The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
How Trump is scrambling to raise cash for campaign
Way behind Biden, he’s schmoozing big-money donors.
As many as three nights a week, Donald Trump has been hosting private dinners at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, schmoozing with some of the Republican Party’s biggest financiers as he races to address a sizable cash shortfall against President Joe Biden.
There is no request for money from the attendees at these meals, which have included Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, and Pepe Fanjul, a sugar magnate, according to people familiar with the sessions. But advisers to Trump’s campaign and his super political action committees hope the charm offensive will eventually pay political and financial dividends.
One of the most pressing issues facing Trump is the financial disparity he and allied groups now face with Biden and the Democratic Party. Democrats have boasted of entering February with $130 million. The Trump operation did not release a full total, but his campaign account and the Republican National Committee had around $40 million.
Trump enters the general election ahead of Biden in public polls. But Biden has taken full advantage of one of the benefits of incumbency, both socking away cash and building out a political operation earlier than his challenger.
Despite years of professing massive wealth and boasting of his desire to “drain the swamp,” the deeply transactional former president is leaning yet again on the cash of others, turning Mara-Lago into a staging ground for billionaires and others with their own agendas. One potential leverage point with the biggest GOP financiers is the package of tax cuts Trump signed into law in 2017. Many of those cuts expire at the end of 2025, and Biden has vowed not to extend them for the nation’s highest earners.
Money often winds up mattering less in presidential races than in down-ballot races. Voters pay attention to the candidates naturally, especially Trump, and the key states all wind up awash in advertising by the fall.
Yet recent presidential contests have been so excruciatingly close that everything has mattered, and Trump is preparing to face an especially large avalanche of Democratic spending this year. Just a single union this past week announced plans to spend $200 million, 10 times what the main Trump super PAC had on hand. A cash edge can help Democrats tilt or expand the battleground map in their favor.
In a sign of the Trump orbit’s urgent need for cash, at least two donors who made seven-figure pledges to support Trump this year were nudged to see if they could instead cut an eight-figure check — meaning $10 million or more — according to a person familiar with the request.
It is an unusually perilous moment for Trump.
The former president is facing converging financial crunches just as he has become the presumptive Republican nominee. The first is the political cash situation. The others are far more personal.
Trump recently posted a $91.6 million bond in a civil case in which he was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation of New York writer E. Jean Carroll. He also must summon the resources to post a roughly $450 million bond, the judgment in a New York civil fraud case against his businesses, in the coming days. And he has mounting legal bills as his first criminal trial nears. Trump’s Save America PAC, which has been paying his lawyers and those of some
witnesses, is set to run dry by summer at the current pace of spending.
Some Trump allies predict they will have enough campaign cash to win, even if it’s less than Biden’s stash.
“Hillary Clinton way outraised President Trump, but he connected with the American people and that was the difference right there,” said Tommy Hicks Jr., a former Republican National Committee co-chair and finance director.
Brian Ballard, a Republican lobbyist, fundraiser and Mar-a-Lago member, said Trump was “incredibly engaged” in the political money fight.
“He understands the one advantage the Biden campaign has is financial resources,” Ballard said, adding “and he understands we need to do all we can to negate that.”
To prepare for the fall, Trump’s advisers have embarked on an aggressive and speedy takeover of the Republican National Committee that included installing his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair, with the intention she’ll focus in part on shoring up fundraising. The Trump team imposed mass layoffs in some departments Monday and is shipping all of the party’s finance and digital fundraising staff to Trump’s Florida headquarters by the end of the month.
On Thursday, Trump formed a new joint fundraising account with the national party and roughly 40 state parties, calling it the Trump 47 Committee, allowing him to directly raise money in chunks of more than $800,000. A splashy dinner in Palm Beach is being planned in early April to fill the new account’s coffers. One person familiar with the planning said donors have pledged more than $25 million.
Trump is said to be concerned about the fundraising gap between his orbit and Biden’s, although he has told advisers he believes he and his allies will ultimately raise what they need, according to one person with knowledge of the discussions.
But some top donors remain hesitant. Among their privately expressed concerns is a fear that large donations could wind up covering Trump’s legal fees, even as his advisers have publicly said the RNC won’t do so. Trump’s main super PAC has, as of January, shifted more than $47 million of the $60 million it had received before the 2024 run began to Trump’s PAC, which is paying Trump’s lawyers.
So far, Trump has reported only a limited well of major contributors during the 2024 race. He has, in the meantime, become increasingly attentive to them.
He recently had a meeting with one of the world’s richest men, Elon Musk, and a brief backstage encounter with Jeff Yass, a billionaire investor in TikTok. Trump said on CNBC he and Yass had not spoken about the company, although he later posted on social media regarding his skepticism about federal legislation that could ban TikTok, especially if it would benefit the parent company of Facebook.
The general election cash chasm was apparent in the
advertising announced in March.
The main Trump super PAC has purchased about $380,000 in radio advertising targeting Black voters in three states this month. The Biden campaign has announced a $30 million ad campaign over six weeks — a nearly 100 to 1 edge in the first stretch of the race.
That ratio does not include the roughly $500,000 the pro-Trump super PAC spent on an ad that trolled Biden the day of his State of the Union speech, questioning whether the president would live to 2029, when his second term would end. The provocative commercial exemplifies what underfunded groups typically do: spend symbolically to generate free media coverage.
Some Republican donors have emphasized that wealthy contributors may write large checks, but they often don’t want to see that fact disclosed, given the controversy that attaches itself to Trump. A number of donors faced public blowback in 2016 for their support.