RNC, in tandem with Trump, announces $65.6 million haul for March

Former President Donald Trump had the best fundraising month of his 2024 campaign now that he’s working in tandem with the Republican National Committee, pulling in $65.6 million in March, the party announced Wednesday.

The party said that Trump, the RNC and their shared accounts now had $93.1 million in cash on hand entering April — roughly double what they had a month earlier.

Trump has been privately meeting with a number of billionaires and potential financiers at Mar-a-lago over the past month. And in his recent takeover of the RNC, his team moved all of the finance and digital staff to Florida.

One reason Trump was able to bring in so much cash so quickly has to do with the joint accounts he now operates with the party. Those joint accounts are allowed to take in far larger donations — one of them can take in checks of as much as $814,600. During the primary, Trump had been limited to raising $6,600 from individual donors to his campaign.

In recent days, Trump has shifted how new dollars that are donated are divided. During the primary, Trump made it so 10 cents of every dollar went to his political action committee, Save America, money that has mostly been used to pay for legal fees related to investigations and his four indictments.

Now Trump is directing 10 cents of every dollar given by small donors not to his PAC but to the RNC, through one of the new shared accounts called the Trump National Committee. And although Trump is no longer directing a share of small donations to his PAC, the biggest donations will land in a separate shared account called the Trump 47 Committee, which directs $5,000 of every large contribution to his PAC even before the party gets any cash.

The March numbers will help Trump narrow the substantial financial hole he had been in compared with President Joe Biden, who had amassed $155 million with the Democratic Party at the end of February. Biden has not yet announced a cash haul for March. The event he held in New York last week with Barack Obama and Bill Clinton raised $25 million, and he also raised more than $10 million in the 24 hours after his State of the Union address.

The Biden campaign has leveraged its early cash edge to announce a $30 million advertising campaign over six weeks.

On Tuesday, a new Wall Street Journal poll found that Trump was leading Biden across six of the seven top battleground states. Trump and Biden were tied in Wisconsin, the seventh state in the poll.