The GOP is taking its most aggressive step yet to torpedo a rival to the new Donald Trump-endorsed fundraising tool that party leaders tout as the answer to their online donor troubles.

On Wednesday morning, the Republican State Leadership Committee, a Washington-based group devoted to electing state-level officials, shut down the Give.GOP fundraising platform by booting it from its online domain registry. The RSLC owns the “.gop” domain, and top Republicans consider Give.GOP to be a threat to the White House-backed WinRed, a long-awaited small-dollar vehicle drawing support from party leaders ahead of the 2020 election.

The website shutdown is the latest in a string of efforts to quash Give.GOP, a platform which allows donors to give to Republican candidates and groups through a voluminous nationwide directory. Three organizations aligned with the party establishment — the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the Republican Governors Association — earlier threatened legal action against Paul Dietzel, the founder of Give.GOP, through cease-and-desist letters. The groups are all included in the Give.GOP directory, and they have accused Give.GOP of using their names without permission.

At the same time, the RNC has announced it will withhold valuable support from candidates and state parties who refuse to use WinRed — an aggressive move partly aimed at cutting off any possible support for rival outfits like Give.GOP and Anedot, another Dietzel company which scores of top Republicans have used for online donation processing in past elections.

The offensive underscores the level of concern within the party about the competitor. Top Republicans made the creation of a small donor platform a priority after suffering heavy losses in the 2018 election, and they have billed WinRed as the answer to the Democratic online fundraising behemoth ActBlue. But for it to be successful, they argue, the party needs to fully consolidate behind it, much as Democrats are with ActBlue.

When Dietzel launched Give.GOP in early July, Republicans expressed alarm that it would impede their efforts to unite the party around WinRed.

The party’s latest move amounts to a further escalation against Dietzel. The RSLC said it had owned rights to the “.gop” domain name for the last five years and had the ability to terminate registrants using it. On Monday afternoon, the organization reached out to “.gop” administrators and told them to remove the Give.GOP website, contending it had violated terms of acceptable use. By Wednesday morning, the site was no longer accessible.

In a statement, Dietzel brushed off the attack, saying that he would revive the site under a new name.

"Apparently, we are being punished for empowering donors to give directly to conservative causes, but the reality is the feedback from conservatives and Trump-supporters we were receiving was very hostile to the ‘GOP’ in the domain name," Dietzel said, adding: "This grassroots, donor-powered platform is not changing and will continue to empower donors to support conservatives and Trump-supporters through a new domain name that will be released soon."

Republicans voice concern that Give.GOP is operating outside the bounds of the party structure, and they charge that it leaves donors vulnerable to the prospect that their funds may go to those who run the site as opposed to party candidates.

Austin Chambers, the RSLC president, described Give.GOP as a “scheme” whose “actions prey on the good intentions of activists who are tricked into believing they are supporting the Republican Party.”

“We won’t stand for this deception, and we will always do what’s right for the party, the president, and the tens of millions of hardworking Americans who support our cause," added Chambers, whose organization is signing on with WinRed.

Dietzel, a digital strategist who waged an unsuccessful campaign for Congress in Louisiana in 2014, has insisted that his site is more cost-friendly to donors than WinRed and that its commission rates are lower. Dietzel originally purchased the Give.GOP domain name in 2017, though he didn’t launch the site as a rival to WinRed until earlier this month.

The Give.GOP site boasts that it “makes it fast and easy for donors to ‘find and fund Republicans,’” and that it offers donors the “ability to contribute directly to the conservative candidates and political committees of their choosing.”

Dietzel has pushed back against the party’s efforts to consolidate around a single fundraising platform and has derided it as tantamount to socialism. And he has reached out through email to rank-and-file RNC officials to make the case that his platform offers a “free-market solution” to the party’s small-dollar woes.

WinRed has posed a serious threat to Anedot, the Republican payment processor that Dietzel launched around a decade ago. WinRed uses a rival vendor: Revv, which was co-founded by former RNC chief digital officer Gerrit Lansing.

The late June launch of WinRed was the culmination of months of behind-the-scenes deliberations involving top Republicans from White House senior adviser Jared Kushner to mega-donor Sheldon Adelson.

The day WinRed went live, Trump took to Twitter to give it his endorsement — a move aimed at consolidating Republicans around the new platform and thwarting competitors.

“This new platform will allow my campaign and other Republicans to compete with the Democrats money machine,” Trump wrote. “This has been a priority of mine and I’m pleased to share that it is up and running!”

GOP officials have taken other steps to get the party behind WinRed. The National Republican Congressional Committee, for example, has offered financial incentives to lawmakers who sign up to use it. And the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC that spends millions of dollars boosting House GOP candidates, said it would begin using strength with small donors as a measure to assess candidates in the future.

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