Will the 'Big Beautiful Bill' Impact Republican Success at Midterms? Josh Kraushaar Weighs In
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Last week, President Donald Trump's super PAC revealed that it has an unsettling amount of cash on hand for a president who is, his occasional musings to the contrary notwithstanding, constitutionally ineligible to run for a third term in office. According to a midyear report filed with the Federal Election Commission, MAGA Inc. is sitting on nearly $200 million, a sum that includes a shade over $175 million collected just in the past six months. Unless collections fall off a cliff in the second half of the year, Trump should enter 2026 with well over a quarter-billion dollars to spend on the midterm elections—a war chest that would make him not only the Republican Party's unquestioned standard-bearer but also perhaps its deepest-pocketed financier for the foreseeable future. Many of the donors to MAGA Inc. would likely donate to any Republican president: real estate developers, oil and gas companies, firearms manufacturers, Wall Street banks, allegedly crooked mortgage brokers, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, and so on. Others made what proved to be prudent investments in their relationships with Trump, who has long viewed the presidency as a tool for rewarding loyal friends and punishing perceived enemies. A Florida personal injury attorney nominated by Trump as the U.S. Ambassador to Colombia, for example, gave $500,000; an investor who now serves on the President's Intelligence Advisory Board gave $250,000. Longtime Trump donors Jeffrey Sprecher, whose company owns the New York Stock Exchange, and his wife, former Georgia Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler, gave a cool $2.5 million apiece in June. In a wild coincidence, Trump announced that he would appoint Loeffler to lead the Small Business Administration six months earlier. But the most notable collection of names—and some of the biggest numbers—are associated with the cryptocurrency industry, which has, in another wild coincidence, netted Trump and his family hundreds of millions of dollars since he took office in January. Foris Dax, which does business as gave MAGA Inc. $10 million. Tools for Humanity, better known as World Network or Worldcoin (and cofounded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman), chipped in $5 million, as did Venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, whose eponymous Silicon Valley firm has invested heavily in crypto projects (including Tools for Humanity), combined to donate $6 million. The Winklevoss twins and their crypto exchange, Gemini Trust Company, donated a total of nearly $4 million. (Tyler donated about $15,000 more in his name than his brother, Cameron, which is how you can tell them apart.) All told, crypto and crypto-adjacent interests have contributed at least $40 million to MAGA Inc. so far this year. This figure does not include $5 million from Elon Musk, whose companies hold crypto assets worth billions of dollars. Despite his extremely funny public falling-out with Trump, Musk evidently still knows what's best for business: On June 27, he ponied up $5 million to the man who more or less just gave him the boot. The steady flow of cash to Trump's political machine is a peek at the struggle for control of the movement Trump created—not necessarily now, when he is both president of the United States and the leader of the Republican Party, but over the next 24 months or so, as his term winds down and he prepares to return to Mar-a-Lago for good. Everyone involved here understands that it is not only the current White House that is for sale, but also the future of a party that has really not had an identity apart from Trump, a 79-year-old man who is decompensating before our eyes, for a decade now. Many of the people who are giving to MAGA Inc. are roughly analogous to investors racing to get in on the ground floor of a promising startup: For anyone who can foot the bill, the chance to own even a sliver of one of this country's two major political parties is too valuable to pass up. And because the first six months of Trump's second administration have been so good for the crypto industry, its wealthier-than-ever luminaries have been among the most aggressive early buyers of (even more) political influence. They envision the country as a nascent Silicon Valley plutocracy, and themselves as its leaders—equal parts fabulously wealthy oligarchs, industry-friendly regulators, and currency revolutionaries on the verge of making fiat money obsolete. Wealthy people have always been able to buy power in Washington, D.C., but rarely have they been this comfortable being this obvious about it. Part of the challenge with gauging the value of these investments is that there is basically no precedent for them. Super PACs have only been around since 2010, after the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission opened the floodgates to unlimited political spending by megacorporations and the billionaires who run them. As a result, President Barack Obama is the only other term-limited president who has ever raised money under the same circumstances, and at the time his supporters plainly did not perceive the same value in continuing to write checks: Again, over the past six months, MAGA Inc. has raked in around $175 million. As The New York Times notes, during the same period in 2013, the primary super PAC affiliated with Obama raised a grand total of $356,000. Generally, candidates from the same party as a sitting president face a tougher road to victory in the midterm elections that follow—a dynamic that is especially salient when a president whose approval rating was already dropping is also trying to fend off persistent questions about the nature of his friendship with the nation's most famous child sex abuser. But the fact that Trump will be the GOP's de facto kingmaker in 2026 will make it very challenging for Republican candidates to break with him on the campaign trail, to the extent that any Republican candidates would have interest in doing so in the first place. If you want to win a primary, you cannot afford to pass up Trump's money—or, worse yet, to do something to make him angry, such that he starts giving to your more enthusiastically MAGA opponent instead. What I am saying here is that the Republican candidates trying to win in purple districts next fall—and, in all likelihood, the serious contenders vying for the GOP presidential nomination in 2028—are not going to be traditional conservatives trying to appeal to swing voters with promises of limited government and lower taxes. They are going to be Trump acolytes steeped in X clips and manosphere content who promise to do his and his donors' bidding. Trump's dominance of the modern GOP has also come at the expense of what remains of the Republican establishment, whose leaders on Capitol Hill are now dealing with the consequences of having long ago ceded control of the party to a made-for-TV businessman who has never cared about its long-term success outside the context of his own political and financial fortunes. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC dedicated to electing Republicans to the House, had around $33 million in cash on hand as of June 30, and the GOP-affiliated Senate analogue came in just behind it, at $29.7 million. If you're doing the math at home, this means that the combined spending power of the Republican lawmakers trying to preserve their majorities in the House and Senate is about one-third the spending power of the party's outgoing president. The only group with anywhere close to as much money as MAGA Inc., The Times reports, is Fairshake, a super PAC backed by—you guessed it—the crypto industry. In other words, Republican candidates can take crypto industry cash funneled through MAGA Inc., or directly from its super PAC. But they are taking that money either way, and dealing with whatever strings come attached to it. For several years now, there has been an open question about what will happen to the Republican Party once Trump, for one reason or another, is no longer in control of it: whether it will revert to the establishment conservatives Trump has rendered all but irrelevant, or whether it will continue as a cult of personality propped up by a coalition of bigots, billionaires, and billionaires who are also bigots. MAGA Inc.'s massive fundraising haul yields a grim answer: As venal as Trump is, the next generation of party leaders will be even more transparently for sale to the highest bidder. Those who can afford it are already spending accordingly.
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