‘Republican donors funneled money to national committee via Guam’

By Jayvee Vallejera

In 2023, the Republican Party of Guam received just one donation of $48.

The year before that, it also received just one donation of $100.

In 2024, the party received a total of $1,937,000 in donations from 193 donors, who ea h plunked down $10,000 to come up with the grand sum of $1.93 million.

What’s going on? How and why did that happen?

Those are the questions journalist Zach Kahn finds answers for in his investigative piece “Trump’s second favorite island,” which came out in the Australian news site, VicNews, or The Victorian News, on July 20, 2025.

The biggest question Kahn raised is why would all these 193 people donate to a political party that’s located 6,000 miles away from the U.S. mainland, on an island that can’t even vote for the U.S. President?

“What’s going on here?” he asked.

According to what he says he has dug up, despite the limits set on how much people can donate to candidates and their national parties, there is actually a loophole that donors can exploit where they can donate to a state’s Republican Party, which in turn is allowed to transfer that money to the RNC—without any limits or caps.

Kahn claims that 97.83% of the money the 193 people donated to the Republican Party of Guam was actually later transferred to the RNC.

“Almost all of the money that was ‘supposed to go’ to the Republican Party of Guam went right back to the RNC instead,” Kahn said. “This is technically legal because unlimited transfers between political party committees is allowed.”

Pacific Island Times tried to obtain comments from Sen. Shawn Gumataotao, chairman of the Republican Party of Guam, via email, but he has yet to respond as of press time.

Kahn also disclosed that the donors to the Republican Party of Guam—many of whom are billionaires, crypto investors, oil moguls, and technocrats, among others—were forced to do that in order to skirt the cap on contributions to the RNC.

“Turns out that all of the people who donated to the Republican Party of Guam already reached the legal contribution limit to the RNC. …They were already forced to max out their donations to the RNC in order to be eligible to donate to GOP state accounts,” Kahn said.

By taking advantage of this loophole, these 193 donors were able to funnel an extra $10,000 each to benefit the RNC, Kahn said. “That’s $1,930,000 they weren’t supposed to give!”

He pointed out that donation limits on national parties like the Democratic National Committee and RNC are necessary because they prevent wealthy donors from exerting influence over national parties, which shape policies and impact the lives of Americans.

“Without donation limits, anyone with enough money can buy influence over either party’s policies and candidates. Politics turns into a pay-to-play game,” he added.

And judging from the names of those who made the donations to the Republican Party of Guam, Kahn said it is not hard to see that many of them have already benefited massively from Trump’s policies that are favorable to the crypto and fossil fuel industries.

“This entire situation also proves that America needs campaign finance reform in order to stop billionaires and insiders from buying influence,” Kahn said. “It’s clear that the current laws designed to separate money and democracy are weak. The practice of unlimited donation transfers between state and national parties undermines the purpose of having donation limits in the first place.”

Read Kahn’s full article here.