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Donald Trump’s campaign claimed on Friday that it had raised more than $34 million immediately following the Thursday evening announcement of his conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records.
The massive fundraising haul comes the morning after a jury found the former president guilty in a criminal hush money case filed in a Manhattan court. Shortly after the verdict was announced, the campaign set out to flip his political misfortune into cash, sending out a flood of fundraising emails, social media posts, and text messages.
“I was just convicted of a RIGGED political Witch Hunt trial: I DID NOTHING WRONG,” the first campaign email read.
Republican lawmakers like J. D. Vance, Eli Crane, and House speaker Mike Johnson linked out to the campaign’s donation page on WinRed. The campaign went as far as warning down-ballot candidates against fundraising for themselves off of Trump’s verdict, according to Politico. The dramatic uptick in donation traffic to Trump’s joint fundraising committee caused the site to shut down, according to the campaign. The joint committee shares some of its funds with the Republican National Committee.
“So many Americans were moved to donate to President Trump's campaign that the WinRed pages went down,” the Trump campaign wrote in an X post on Thursday. “We are working on getting the website back online as quickly as possible.”
WinRed did not respond to requests from WIRED to confirm the reason the platform went offline. The site came back online about an hour after it went down.
Larger donations from major Silicon Valley tech investors also started to come in Thursday night. Shaun Maguire, an investor for Sequoia Capital, posted a lengthy missive on X announcing that he would be donating $300,000 to the Trump campaign. Maguire declined to identify other donors who are also considering supporting Trump.
“There are many investors doing similar things but I can't out them,” Maguire told WIRED in an email Thursday.
David Sacks, a venture capitalist who is hosting a fundraiser for Trump next month, shared Maguire’s sentiment, suggesting that more wealthy Silicon Valley donors were beginning to shift their support to Trump.
“After Biden’s disastrous presidency, Trump has a lot of supporters in Silicon Valley; many are just afraid to admit it,” Sacks said in an X post replying to Maguire on Thursday. “But with each act of courage, like this one, the dam begins to break.”
The influx of cash wasn’t entirely surprising. Hours after Trump surrendered to the Fulton County jail last August in a separate case, his campaign brought in more than $7 million in donations. It also issued new merch, like shirts and mugs, featuring Trump’s mugshot.
Meanwhile, a Trump memecoin—in which the former president reportedly has significant holdings—reached an all-time high in value after initially dipping upon news of the verdict.
Far-right provocateurs and their followers referred to Thursday’s verdict as a declaration of war online, demonstrating that the case would not hinder their support for the former president.
Trump is scheduled to be sentenced on July 11, four days before the Republican National Convention.
“President Trump and our campaign are immensely grateful from [for] this outpouring of support from patriots across our country. President Trump is fighting to save our nation and November 5 is the day Americans will deliver the real verdict,” Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, Trump campaign senior advisers, said in a Friday statement.
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