Team Trump Is Desperate for Cash—And Still Lagging Behind Biden
It turns out that Donald Trump’s millions of dollars worth of legal bills aren’t the only financial struggles on his mind. The former president has raised just a fraction of the money that his opponent has on the campaign trail.
Trump’s presidential campaign raised $10.9 million in February, bringing his war chest to a grand total of $33.5 million, according to campaign disclosures. In comparison, President Joe Biden’s campaign raised $21.3 million, giving him a total of $71 million in campaign spending money. And he plans to use it to drown Trump in attack ads, Politico reported late Wednesday.
It’s a similar situation at the party level. The Republican National Committee raised $10.7 million in February, for a total of just $11.3 million fundraised overall. Poor fundraising was one of the main reasons that former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel was forced to step down.
The Democratic National Committee, on the other hand, raised $16.6 million, for a total of $26.5 million cash on hand, according to Politico.
Trump’s money situation isn’t helped by the fact that most of what he fundraises has had to go towards his myriad legal struggles. A pro-Trump super PAC called MAGA Inc. has reportedly sent more than $50 million to Save America, Trump’s leadership PAC, since last year to help cover the former president’s legal bills. And it’s unclear how much longer that can continue.
Save America spent $5.6 million on legal expenses in February alone, and it was only kept going by a $5 million refund from MAGA Inc. The super PAC now has just $7.75 million more it can refund to Save America, which only has about $4 million in cash left.
So it’s no wonder that Trump has had to resort to hawking ugly sneakers and promoting fan-supported GoFundMe campaigns to raise money. He has only days left to post a nearly half-billion-dollar bond in his New York civil fraud case before the state attorney general can start seizing his assets as repayment.
Trump recently posted a $91.6 million bond in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit, which was guaranteed by the Chubb Corporation, much to the insurance group’s clients’ dismay. He still owes Carroll $5 million from her first lawsuit.
Trump also owes nearly $400,000 to The New York Times, thousands of dollars for gag order violations, and $382,000 to Orbis Business Intelligence, the consulting firm owned by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Trump had sued Orbis over a dossier Steele compiled in 2016 that alleged Trump and members of his inner circle had been “compromised” by Russia’s security service.