Donald Trump’s Most Loyal Lawmakers Matt Gaetz Marjorie Taylor Greene Boebert Cawthorn Are Losing Money

Last year, it was a fundraising party for MAGA Goon Squad. But in 2022, without the stimulus from donors of an insurgency effort, things are headed in the wrong direction.

The first three months of the year grossed more than $275,000 from representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL) – the quartet of America First, pro-Donald Trump election opponents love fanfare. All told, it was their worst performance to date.

It’s not always like this.

In 2021, that crew saw an amazing comeback, raking in a full-year total of $4.8 million. The only net loss for the year was Gaetz, whose campaign account dropped $95,000 amid a flurry of bombshell headlines and high costs related to a child sex trafficking investigation. happenning. However, the fundraising platform after the uprising was so fertile, he even posted record fundraisers, raising $3.2 million in the first half of 2021.

But last year’s lead campaign also did the most damage this year. That distinction will fall to Greene’s campaign, after bankrolling $5.2 million last year, which began in 2022 with $3 million. While amazing, that total didn’t exceed the record spending that left her ultimately putting $314,000 in the hole. This is Greene’s first negative fundraiser since her election.

The only member of the team that hasn’t lost a quarter is Boebert. Gaetz’s campaign ran in both the second and third quarters of last year, and Cawthorn hasn’t skyrocketed since his multi-million-dollar fundraising following the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

After losing another $41,300 since January, the Cawthorn campaign has only kept about $282,000, more than half of its cumulative amount this time last year. And he removed any firepower he might have held on to his other committees, in the process of ranking potential allies.

To round off the existing total, Gaetz — a three-term incumbent — has about $1.6 million. Boebert has about $2.2 million. And Greene deposited the whole crew with $3 million in the bank.

It is not immediately clear whether a unified theory can explain the sensation. Each candidate can claim their recent epidemics.

Cawthorn can’t seem to stop his extravagant spending. Legal and PR bills wiped out Gaetz last year, but have now subsided, allowing him to stick his nose in the water. And Greene seems to have changed this year, ditching her tried-and-true — and costly — digital efforts and instead placing a lucrative bet on a failed direct mail campaign.

While Boebert’s consistency is outstanding, this quarter’s total represents her smallest increase to date. The slim margins can be attributed in large part to the fact that she spent a record $700,000 — hundreds of thousands more than average.

Curiously, more than $470,000 of that money went to “media production” services from Rock Chalk Media, a company owned by former Congressman Jason Chaffetz’s brother, Alex. And while Rock Chalk has always a top Boebert purveyor — Jason Chaffetz backed her key 2020 challenge for a GOP incumbent — this final quarter campaign payouts are so high, just one half of what it paid the company for all of 2021.

Nor is it immediately clear what kind of productive value that money bought, because Google, Boebert’s Facebook, and Twitter Campaign and video ads are no different from face-to-face selfies and no makeup.

But even with those coincidental explanations, the January 6 effect is huge.

The group has never seen contributions like they did in the early months of 2021. Vote denialism, Capitol riots, and President Trump’s subsequent second impeachment triggered the MAGAsphere, and in In the weeks that followed, frustrated right-wing donors threw financial support behind the officials whose voices resonated most with them in the post-Trump period.

Instead, for the past year, they’ve largely relied on rhetoric, outrage bait, and media stunts to keep their name — and hopefully some cash — in the pipeline. onion. And while the controversy seemed like a winning gimmick for the Goons, it didn’t always work out, such as the cash burn that was the Greene-Gaetz “Put America First” fundraising tour in last summer.

While several kerfuffles have popped up over the past three months, the only team member to have garnered major media traction this quarter has been Cawthorn — and that controversy has led to public shame from the press. Republican congressional leader.

With the midterms due in November, this seems like a particularly bad time for these Republicans to lose money. But all four MAGA bombers are from Republican counties, and keeping the safe-haven seat usually doesn’t put much strain on incumbent bank accounts.

However, this year could be a little different.

For all four, the multimillion-dollar controversies also brought challenges from within the party. Boebert and Cawthorn face potentially problematic races, and the burning pit is the bank account of the Cawthorn operation that has even left his own advisors scratching their heads.

It looks like Cawthorn’s bank funds are earmarked for a slightly slimmer future. Two out-of-state $1,000 donations last quarter were found to be erroneous, and one of the donors told The Daily Beast, likely fraudulent.