Before Donald Trump was improbably elected president, he was best known for playing a successful businessman on TV while squandering his inheritance, putting six businesses into bankruptcy, and going broke in the 1990s. Now, he has apparently applied that monetary savvy to his reelection campaign to similar results, i.e. near financial ruin.
The New York Times reports that despite the RNC and Trump campaign having raised a combined $1.1 billion from the beginning of 2019 through July, Team Trump has blown through more than $800 million and may run out of cash before the November election. Where did the money go? According to the Times, $11 million was spent on Super Bowl ads to prevent the president from having an epic meltdown over Mike Bloomberg’s 60-second spot. But Bloomberg is worth approximately $54 billion, or roughly 17 times as much as Trump, and can afford to air commercials with the express purpose of fucking with people. Not only was the Super Bowl ad a financially questionable “vanity splurge” to make the uniquely sensitive 45th president feel better about himself, it also made little sense; according to the Times, it was more than the campaign spent on TV in major battleground states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, and Minnesota. A similar phenomenon occurred thanks to former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale who, in addition to reportedly treating himself to a personal driver, also reportedly dropped more than $1 million on ads that aired in Washington, D.C. While Trump has no chance of winning there, he consumes roughly eight hours of television in the area per day, and the thinking was that he’d be pleased to see the spots talking him up in between mainlining Fox & Friends and Hannity.
Elsewhere, the campaign hired “a coterie of highly paid consultants” like Trump’s former bodyguard; a large and well-paid staff was housed at a “cavernous, well-appointed office” in the Virginia suburbs; a company called Yondr was contracted for nearly $110,000 to make magnetic pouches to store cell phones during fundraisers so donors couldn’t record Trump saying something stupid and then leak it to the media; and more than $800,000 was poured into promoting Parscale’s Instagram and Facebook accounts, where he delivered pro-Trump ads. (On Twitter, Parscale claimed for free—if you don’t count his salary—that Trump was delivered by God to save the nation.) Also, the MAGA hats and Trump-branded chocolates did not come cheap:
Just procuring the Trump paraphernalia that supporters buy costs a lot. Two firms that make campaign swag were paid more than $30 million combined since 2019.
At Mr. Trump’s direction, the party has taken a spare-no-expense approach to donor maintenance, with the R.N.C. spending more than $6 million in “donor mementos.” The spending has gone to stationery shops, the White House Historical Association ($538,000) and the Hershey Company, the chocolate-maker ($337,000), which cover costs for items such as the White House-branded candies given away by administrations of both parties.
And, of course, there was the money that went toward paying the president’s legal bills and filling the coffers of his personal businesses, the ones from which he did not divest after being inaugurated in 2017:
Republicans, for instance, have been saddled with extra legal costs, more than $21 million since 2019, resulting from investigations into Mr. Trump and, eventually, his impeachment trial. The R.N.C. also paid a large legal bill of $666,666.67 to Reuters News & Media at the end of June. Both Reuters and the R.N.C. declined to discuss the payment. It was labeled “legal proceedings—IP resolution,” suggesting it was related to a potential litigation over intellectual property.
Mr. Trump, who once joked he could be the first candidate to make money running for president, has steered, along with the Republican Party, about $4 million into the Trump family businesses since 2019: hundreds of thousands of dollars to Mr. Trump’s club at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, lavish donor retreats at Trump hotels, office space in Trump Tower, and thousands of dollars at the steakhouse in Mr. Trump’s Washington, D.C., hotel. Many of the specifics of Mr. Trump’s spending are opaque; since 2017, the campaign and the R.N.C. have routed $227 million through a single limited liability company linked to Trump campaign officials. That firm, American Made Media Consultants, has been used to place television and digital ads and was the subject of a recent Federal Election Commission complaint arguing it was used to disguise the final destination of spending, which has included paychecks to Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle, the partners of Mr. Trump’s two adult sons.
Millions more followed to firms tied to R.N.C. and Trump-linked officials, including more than $39 million to two firms, Parscale Strategy LLC and Giles-Parscale, controlled by Mr. Parscale since the beginning of 2017. Mr. Parscale said that he had “no ownership or financial interest in A.M.M.C.” and that he had “negotiated a contract with the family for 1 percent of digital ad spend and after becoming campaign manager took no percentage.”
Plus, there are the costs associated with your candidate going off the rails 24 hours a day, 7 days a week:
There have been other squandered costs driven by Mr. Trump’s sometimes mercurial desires. He switched his convention plans twice, incurring many expenses along the way. In July, for instance, the R.N.C. made a $325,000 payment to the Ritz-Carlton Amelia Island near Jacksonville for the convention that never happened there. The party is not expected to get that money back.
At this point, with the situation reportedly bordering on dire, Trump is allegedly considering spending a large chunk of his own money on the race, an unprecedented move for an incumbent candidate. On Tuesday, he insisted on Twitter that the early spending—which the campaign has nothing to show for as it’s trailing in the majority of national and swing state polls—was a brilliant idea:
Later, he told reporters that the campaign didn’t need any additional funding, while adding that he would put up the money if it did, which it definitely doesn’t.
