President Trump’s reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee (RNC) have raised some $5 million since House Democrats moved to launch an impeachment inquiry of the president, a top Trump campaign official said Wednesday.
“In the 24 hours since news of Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment announcement, @realDonaldTrump’s campaign & @GOP have BLOWN OUT fundraising!” Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, tweeted, adding that donations have come in from all 50 states.
The fundraising surge comes less than 24 hours after Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced that the House would initiate a formal impeachment inquiry centering on Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian officials to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, one of Trump’s chief political rivals. It shows how Republicans have sought to seize on the impeachment push to rile up the president’s political base and rally conservative enthusiasm ahead of 2020.
In a tweet Wednesday, RNC chief of staff Richard Walters said the Trump campaign and the RNC had raised a combined $30 million in the past week alone.
{mosads}Trump has sought to cast the impeachment inquiry as nothing more than a “witch hunt” and has insisted that nothing about his request to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was inappropriate or nefarious.
A partial record of a July call between Trump and Zelensky released by the White House on Wednesday shows that the American president urged Zelensky to open a corruption investigation after a discussion of U.S. military assistance to Ukraine.
Trump and his allies are betting that his most loyal supporters will not be swayed by the conversation and that the impeachment inquiry will ultimately backfire on Democrats in 2020, when Trump is up for reelection.
So far, more than 200 House Democrats and the chamber’s lone Independent, Rep. Justin Amash (Mich.), have come out in support of the impeachment inquiry. But Republican lawmakers have remained unmoved by the release of the call record and have rushed to the president’s defense, arguing that nothing in the phone call warrants impeachment.
Democrats argue, however, that the president’s actions mean he used the power of his office to compel a foreign government to investigate one of his political opponents and that such behavior warrants a formal investigation.