There are some issues
I have always assumed Trump would have more than enough money to finance his campaign. There’s a lot of cash floating around and the MAGA cult loves to give him money. Still, this doesn’t seem like good news:
As Donald Trump’s legal troubles consume more and more of his time, they’re also consuming more of his donors’ money—and there’s a huge hole in the bucket.
On Tuesday, Trump’s “Save America” leadership political action committee reported raising just $8,508 from donors in the entire month of January, while spending about $3.9 million, according to a new filing with the Federal Election Commission.
Nearly $3 million of that overall spending total was used for one purpose: to pay lawyers.
At the same time, the Trump campaign itself reported a net loss of more than $2.6 million for the month of January. It raised about $8.8 million while spending around $11.5 million, according to a separate filing made public on Tuesday.
The filings reveal that Trump is continuing to burn through his donors’ funds as he struggles to feed two massive cash drains—astronomical legal bills stemming from numerous civil cases and four criminal indictments, plus the costs of a national presidential campaign.
After the Trump filings were released on Tuesday evening, his sole primary challenger, Nikki Haley, flashed a sign of strength, with her campaign reporting $11.5 million in receipts last month. It is the first-ever fundraising period where Haley’s campaign outraised Trump.
Despite reporting almost no donations in January, the Save America PAC—a group Trump launched days after the 2020 election, ostensibly to fund legal challenges—actually increased its bottom line by more than $1 million, ending the month with nearly $6.3 million on hand.
However, that increase can’t be chalked up to new donations. It’s entirely due to a $5 million transfer from a different pro-Trump super PAC, which is still in the process of refunding $60 million that the former president demanded back last year, as his legal bills threatened to put Save America, his legal slush fund, into bankruptcy.
The super PAC has been kicking that refund back in $5 million installments beginning late last spring, but that emergency bailout won’t last, either—the full refund is set to be completed by June.
There’s another metric for the depth of Trump’s financial strain: Save America itself had to bail out yet another one of Trump’s PACs, transferring $500,000 to his old campaign committee in the middle of January. That group, called “Make America Great Again PAC,” started the year with only about $570,000 in the bank, so the mid-month injection from the sputtering Save America suggests that MAGA PAC might very well be in danger of bottoming out too.
A Trump spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a comment request.
As he heads into his third consecutive presidential campaign, it’s safe to say Trump’s cash apparatus is complicated.
I know we’re supposed to believe that he’s a juggernaut and we should all be petrified of him. But he lost the last presidential election and he was an incumbent in the middle of a once in century crisis. That isn’t supposed to happen. Historically, the country rallies around the president at times like that. But he lost.
Sure he could cheat again or incite another insurrection. But there are a lot of facts out there that indicate that he’s not the force that everyone seems to think he is. This money madness is yet another sign of it. Where are all the big donors? Where is the cult?