President raises $250M since Election Day defeat

Donald J. Trump will exit the White House as a private citizen next month perched atop a pile of campaign cash unheard-of for an outgoing president, and with few legal limits on how to spend it.

Deflated by a loss he has yet to acknowledge, Trump has cushioned the blow by coaxing huge sums of money from his loyal supporters — often under dubious pretenses — raising roughly $250 million since Election Day along with the national party.

More than $60 million of that sum has gone to a new political action committee, according to people familiar with the matter, which Trump will control after he leaves office. Those funds, which far exceed what previous outgoing presidents had at their disposal, provide him with tremendous flexibility for his postpresidential ambitions: He could use the money to quell rebel factions within the party, reward loyalists, fund his travels and rallies, hire staff, pay legal bills and even lay the groundwork for a far-from-certain 2024 run.

The postelection blitz of fundraising has cemented Trump’s position as an unrivaled force and the preeminent fundraiser of the Republican Party, even in defeat. His largest single day for online donations actually came after Election Day — raising almost $750,000 per hour Nov. 6. So did his second-biggest day. And his third.

“Right now, he is the Republican Party,” said John McLaughlin, a Republican pollster who worked on Trump’s reelection campaign. “The party knows that virtually every dollar they’ve raised in the last four years, it’s because of Donald Trump.”

During the campaign, many of the large expenditures, like television and digital ad buys, were routed through a secretive LLC called American Made Media Consultants. That allowed the Trump campaign and its joint committee with the national party to effectively shield many details of its spending, including who was being paid and how much. More than $700 million has gone through the LLC since the beginning of 2019.

What no one knew was that the LLC represented yet another intermingling of Trump’s political, financial and familial interests. New documents reviewed by the New York Times show that Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law and a senior campaign adviser, served on the board — and was named on drafts of the incorporation papers. So was John Pence, the nephew of Vice President Mike Pence and a senior Trump adviser.

Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Trump, said both Lara Trump and John Pence resigned from the board in 2019, and neither were paid for their positions.

For Trump, the quarter-billion dollars he and the party raised over six weeks is enough to pay off all of his remaining campaign bills and to fund his fruitless legal challenges and still leave tens of millions of dollars.