President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) launched a joint fundraising effort with WinRed Strategies, selling t-shirts hailing the president and Senate leader as “Back-to-Back Supreme Court Champs.”
On the t-shirt sleeves read the names “Gorsuch” and “Kavanaugh,” referring to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Donors who give $35 or more will receive a t-shirt.
“President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell just keep WINNING. They confirmed TWO conservative Supreme Court Justices in the last 2 years,” the campaign website explains. “We just launched these exclusive, limited-edition, Official Back to Back Supreme Court Champs T-shirts to celebrate our win and drive liberals crazy.”
Half of each contribution will go to Trump’s reelection “Make America Great Again Committee” and the other half will go to McConnell’s Senate Committee.
“President Trump kept his promise to appoint solid, conservative judges, including two stellar Supreme Court justices, and Senator McConnell has been a superstar in shepherding through their confirmations,” Tim Murtaugh, communications director at the Trump campaign, told the Washington Free Beacon. “This t-shirt is great for Americans who want to keep winning and help President Trump and Republicans to victory in 2020.”
WinRed, a Republican fundraising engine aimed at eliminating the fundraising advantage Democrats have enjoyed from ActBlue, launched the joint merchandising campaign.
“A huge advantage of the Democrats’ ActBlue donation platform has been joint or tandem fundraising that allows candidates to collaborate on fundraising initiatives and share the donations,” Michael Duncan, a consultant for McConnell, told the Free Beacon. “It allows campaigns to surf in the wake of other candidate’s news cycles and add to the overall pot of donations—all in a unified platform with saved credit card information.”
“Now Republicans have their own unified platform, WinRed, to compete with the left,” Duncan added. He mentioned momentum from McConnell’s campaign account getting blocked on Twitter for calling out death threats against the senator.
Gerrit Lansing, WinRed’s president, told the Free Beacon he thinks merchandise campaigns like the “Back-to-Back Supreme Court Champs” shirts will be a big part of fundraising this cycle. “The top campaigns right now use merchandise to create and drive news and revenue,” he said. “It’s the marriage of the press release and e-commerce, and it will be a major theme in the 2020 cycle.”
The Trump campaign recently started selling environmentally-friendly red plastic straws emblazoned with the name “Trump.” The campaign has sold more than 140,000 straws, raking in $460,000 for the campaign.
It seems these “Back-to-Back Supreme Court Champs” shirts will also be a smashing success. If Trump straws will trigger leftists, imagine what Gorsuch-Kavanaugh t-shirts will do. While it is tragic to see the Supreme Court politicized, conservatives’ consciences can rest easy because the left is responsible for politicizing the Supreme Court in the first place. Originalism — a return to the plain meaning of the text of the Constitution — should not be a partisan issue.
Follow Tyler O’Neil, the author of this article, on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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