Trump is losing to Biden when it comes to cash
Donald Trump has always loved to boast about how much money he has – or claims to have. When he announced his presidential run in 2015, he pledged to self-finance his campaign and crowed, “I don’t need anybody’s money.”
He sure needs some now.
President Biden’s reelection campaign reported Wednesday that it has $71 million in cash on hand - more than double the $33.5 million that Trump’s campaign reported having. If you throw in the bank balances of affiliated groups supporting the candidates, Trump’s campaign liquidity rises to $42 million – but Biden’s soars to a stunning $155 million, a ridiculous amount for this point in the cycle.
It makes me wonder about all those stories telling us how unenthusiastic Democrats are about Biden’s reelection. I’m starting to think that maybe – hear me out – we should pay less attention to what people say and more to what they actually do.
The Republican National Committee is in no position to bail the Trump campaign out. It reported raising $10.7 million in February, ending the month with $11.3 million in the bank. But the Democratic National Committee raised $16.6 million in February and was left with $26.6 million in cash on hand. No wonder that Trump sent daughter-inlaw Lara Trump over to the RNC to try to improve the balance sheet.
The Biden campaign can be excused for a bit of chest-thumping. “If Donald Trump put up these kinds of numbers on ‘The Apprentice,’ ” communications director Michael Tyler said in a statement, “he’d fire himself.”
At the moment, of course, campaign cash might be the least of Trump’s money concerns. His lawyers told a New York court this week that the former president has been unable to secure a bond that would give him time to appeal a $454 million judgment against him and his company for fraud.
Trump approached more than 30 companies about underwriting the bond, his lawyers said, but all refused to accept real estate as collateral – and real estate is the source of most of Trump’s wealth. The insurance firm Chubb did underwrite a $91 million bond for Trump to appeal a separate civil judgment (for defaming writer E. Jean Carroll) but decided to steer clear of the fraud case.
New York Attorney General Letitia
James could theoretically begin seizing Trump’s assets as soon as next week if he is unable to secure and post a bond. It would surely be galling for Trump to lose his gaudy triplex apartment in Manhattan’s Trump Tower, where he famously descended the escalator in 2015 to announce he was running for president.
Declaring bankruptcy is the one remedy guaranteed to keep the wolf away from Trump’s lavishly gilded door, but he has reportedly ruled it out. That would likely give him years of breathing room on the massive fines, which Trump should know given his past: He has used bankruptcy six times largely to get out from under his foolish and ruinous foray into the casino business in Atlantic City.
Of course, filing for bankruptcy in the middle of the campaign would threaten Trump’s image as a successful, respected businessman. The Post quoted a source close to Trump as saying: “He’d rather have Letitia James show up with the sheriff at 40 Wall [a Trump office tower] and make a huge stink about it than say he’s bankrupt.”
Trump’s personal cash crunch is relevant because the campaign is helping pay the soaring legal bills that he and his associates – and co-defendants in the criminal cases – are racking up. Trump’s Save America political action committee has spent $8.5 million on legal costs since the beginning of the year. The campaign itself has paid another $1.8 million to lawyers.
So far, the RNC’s position has been that it will not use Republican Party funds to pay Trump’s legal bills. But a resolution that would have made this stance official failed to win enough support to make it to the floor at a recent RNC meeting. Watch as they do, not as they say.
Eugene Robinson is a columnist for The Washington Post.
There is a gathering storm over the nation’s electric supply.
What has been described as the world’s biggest machine, the U.S. electricity system, is stressed — and that stress will increasingly affect reliability. That means sporadic blackouts, some extensive. While the nation won’t be plunged into total darkness, regional difficulties will occur, according to the industry’s own watchdog group, the North American Electric Reliability Corp.
There are nearly 3,000 electric utilities in the United States, and what is known as the grid is, in fact, three grids: the Eastern, the Western and Texas. The first two interconnect and flow power back and forth where possible, but Texas is separate — and not subject to the regulation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
There are three classifications of electric utilities: the big investorowned companies like Pacific Gas & Electric, ConEd and the operating units of the giant Southern Co.; the 2,000 public power companies, usually municipally owned, and a few, like TVA, federal government-owned; and the rural electric cooperatives, which can be quite large or very small. Together, they operate the grids in surprising harmony and collegial cooperation.
The price of electricity is rising faster than inflation, according to the Energy Information Administration — a sure sign of building pressure on the companies. The causes of this stress are many. First, there is more demand for electricity across the board. That demand is rising about 2 percent a year, and the increase may accelerate after 2026.
Contributing to the demand is the proliferation of data centers and their huge appetite for electricity — an appetite now fed by artificial intelligence and its increasing use everywhere.
Then there is the effect of environmentally driven demand: switching heavy industry from using fossil fuels to using electricity for high-energy uses like steel-making. This is set to grow.
In the same way, the use of electrified transportation is upping its share of electricity demand: It isn’t just Priuses and similar personal vehicles but big fleets, particularly for in-city deliveries. The Postal Service, Amazon and other fleet users are converting to electricity.