Trump raises $90M for re-election bid and GOP

With the 2018 midterms underway, President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and two affiliated committees entered the third quarter with a massive fundraising haul of $90 million and a steep decline in attorneys fees, which have consumed his re-election expenses since he took office.

Trump’s campaign committee and two fundraising committees that jointly raise money with the Republican National Committee — Trump Victory and the Trump Make America Great Again Committee — together raised $17.7 million in the second quarter, for a total of about $90 million in the 2018 cycle, according to Federal Election Committee records filed Sunday evening.

Trump began fundraising for 2020 soon after he won the presidency. He continues to energize small-dollar donors, FEC filings show. In the second quarter of 2018, 62 percent of the direct contributions to his campaign committee came from donations of $200 or less. The Trump campaign reported $33 million in cash on hand at the end of the quarter.

Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law and senior adviser to his campaign committee, in a statement called the small-dollar donations a sign of “the continued support of so many Americans who resoundingly approve of Donald Trump’s performance as President.”

Also in the second quarter, the campaign reported a significant decline in attorneys fees, both in the total amount paid in legal consulting fees and the share of legal fees as a part of its total spending, filings show.

Its attorneys fees totaled $338,254, or less than 10 percent of the $3.6 million it spent from April through June, filings show. That represents a drop of nearly $500,000 since the first quarter of 2018, and a notable decline from the last quarter of 2017, when legal fees surged to $1.1 million.

In all, the campaign committee has spent $4.3 million on legal consulting fees since Trump took office.