How Trump got unwitting online donors
Stacy Blatt was in hospice care last September listening to Rush Limbaugh’s warnings about how badly Donald Trump’s campaign needed money when he went online and chipped in everything he could: $500.
It was a big sum for a 63year-old battling cancer and living in Kansas City on less than $1,000 per month. But that single contribution — federal records show it was his first ever — quickly multiplied. Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell Blatt, for help.
What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud.
“It felt,” Russell Blatt said, “like it was a scam.”
But what the Blatts believed was duplicity was an intentional scheme to boost revenues by the Trump campaign and the for-profit company that processed its online donations, WinRed. Facing a cash crunch and getting badly outspent by the Democrats, the campaign had begun last September to set up recurring donations by default for online donors for every week until the election.
Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out.
As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by the New York Times showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.
The sheer magnitude of the money involved is staggering for politics. In the final 2 ½ months of 2020, the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts issued more than 530,000 refunds worth $64.3 million to online donors. All campaigns make refunds for various reasons, including to people who give more than the legal limit. But the sum the Trump operation refunded dwarfed that of Joe Biden’s campaign and his equivalent Democratic committees, which made 37,000 online refunds totaling $5.6 million in that time.
The recurring donations swelled Trump’s treasury in September and October, just as his finances were deteriorating. He was then able to use tens of millions of dollars he raised after the election, under the guise of fighting his unfounded fraud claims, to help cover the refunds he owed.
In effect, the money that Trump had to refund amounted to an interestfree loan from unwitting supporters at the most important juncture of the 2020 race.
Political strategists, digital operatives and campaign finance experts said they could not recall ever seeing refunds at such a scale. Trump, the RNC and their shared accounts refunded far more money to online donors in the last election cycle than every federal Democratic candidate and committee in the country combined.
Donors typically said they intended to give once or twice and later discovered on their bank statements and credit card bills that they were donating over and over again. Some, like Stacy Blatt, who died of cancer in February, sought an injunction from their banks and credit cards. Others pursued refunds directly from WinRed, which typically granted them to avoid more costly formal disputes.
Jason Miller, a spokesperson for Trump, downplayed the rash of fraud complaints and the $122.7 million in total refunds issued by the Trump operation. He said internal records showed that 0.87 percent of its WinRed transactions had been subject to formal credit card disputes. “The fact we had a dispute rate of less than 1 percent of total donations despite raising more grassroots money than any campaign in history is remarkable,” he said.
The small and bright yellow box popped up on Trump’s digital donation portal around March 2020. The text was boldface, simple and straightforward: “Make this a monthly recurring donation.”
The box came prefilled with a checkmark.
Even that was more aggressive than what the Biden campaign would do in 2020. Biden officials said they rarely used prechecked boxes to automatically have donations recur monthly or weekly; the exception was on landing pages where advertisements and emails had explicitly asked supporters to become repeat donors.
But for Trump, the prechecked monthly box was just the beginning.
By June, the campaign and the RNC were experimenting with a second prechecked box, to default donors into making an additional contribution — called the money bomb. An early test arrived in the run-up to Trump’s birthday, June 14. The results were tantalizing: That date became the biggest day for online donations in the campaign’s history.
The two prechecked yellow boxes would be a fixture for the rest of the campaign. And so would a much larger volume of refunds.
Until then, the Biden and Trump operations had nearly identical refund rates on WinRed and ActBlue in 2020: 2.18 percent for Trump and 2.17 percent for Biden.
But from the day after Trump’s birthday through the rest of the year, Biden’s refund rate remained nearly flat, at 2.24 percent, while Trump’s soared to 12.29 percent.
Around the same time, officials who fielded fraud claims at bank and credit card companies noticed a surge in complaints against the Trump campaign and WinRed.
“It started to go absolutely wild,” said one fraud investigator with Wells Fargo. “It just became a pattern,” said another at Capital One. A consumer representative for USAA, which primarily serves military families, recalled an older veteran who discovered repeated WinRed charges from donating to Trump only after calling to have his balance read to him by phone.
And after Trump’s first public speech of his postpresidency at the end of February, his political operation sent its first text message to supporters since he left the White House. “Did you miss me?” he asked.
The message directed supporters to a WinRed donation page with two prechecked yellow boxes. Trump raised $3 million that day, according to an adviser, with more to come from the recurring donations in the months ahead.