RINO OBSTRUCTION! RINO BETRAYAL! screams the subject line of a fundraising email sent to right-wing activists Monday.
“RINOs in Indiana just BETRAYED EVERY LAST ONE OF US!” says the email, which urges people to respond within five minutes to sign a petition demanding that a special legislative session be called to pass “Trump’s map.” To amp up the urgency, a countdown clock starts at just two minutes, though when time runs out, the site assures, “The timer has expired, but you can still donate below.”
Actually, it was back in November that Indiana Senate Republicans declined to go along with President Donald Trump’s demand for red state legislators to engage in aggressively partisan redistricting—a move by Trump to try to rig the 2026 midterms and keep Republicans in control of the House of Representatives. Not surprisingly, the obedience-demanding and revenge-seeking Trump is backing primary challengers to five Republican state senators who voted against the redistricting plan.
Trump allies had pushed unsuccessfully for a special session in December; the legislature’s regular 2026 session began last month, not that you’d know if from this week’s Women for America email.
Women for America has been described as a “scam PAC” – one that raises money from ideologically committed activists but spends most of the it on operating expenses and little on actual campaigns.
In the 2023-2024 election cycle, the PAC reported raising nearly $370,000 and spending about $345,000—only $10,000 of that was spent on independent expenditure ads in two congressional campaigns. The PAC reported raising more than $390,000 in 2025 and spending $406,000. The committee donated $65,000 to the House Freedom Fund, a PAC aligned with the right-wing Freedom Caucus.
Last year, the PAC sent out deceptive fundraising messages suggesting that recipients were owed a $5,000 “DOGE check” and were on the verge of missing the opportunity if they didn’t respond immediately. The Bulwark called it a “gross and brazen” scam:
FEC records suggest that WAF is primarily an open-and-shut scam PAC…These sorts of scam groups are one of the great illustrations of how slimy and cynical and abusive politics can be. In this case, the group’s proprietors have taken the concept of saving taxpayer money (DOGE) to swindle people (likely the elderly who don’t have the greatest internet know-how) out of their money, by convincing them that Elon and Trump want to give them money. It’s grotesque.
The Bulwark reported that Trumpworld figures Karoline Leavitt, now White House press secretary, and Mary Vought, former wife of OMB Director Russ Vought, were formerly connected to the PAC, and noted that treasurer Thomas Datwyler has “a long track record of campaign finance scammery.”
The fine print on the donation page for this week’s email makes it seem like the redistricting message was thrown out without much care, because it includes language from previous fundraising efforts that have nothing to do with Indiana or redistricting:
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