Trump Blew A Big Cash Advantage But Still Puts Campaign Dollars In His Own Pocket
WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump forced both his current and former campaign managers to take pay cuts in the last two months, but nevertheless funneled another quarter-million dollars into his own cash registers.
Even as his reelection operation lost a once-dominating fundraising advantage to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, new filings with the Federal Election Commission show that Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee spent another $203,000 at his hotel a few blocks from the White House and another $37,542 to rent space at his Trump Tower in Manhattan ― although the campaign is based at a high-rise in Arlington, Virginia. Total reported payments in August from the campaign and the RNC to the president’s own businesses amounted to $251,409.
Since he took office in January 2017, the political committees under Trump’s control have spent a total of $7,231,392 at Trump’s various businesses, according to a HuffPost analysis of FEC records.
Biden started the year essentially broke and largely written off. But thanks to a combination of staggering fundraising and low spending, he entered the final two months of the campaign with $466 million available, compared to Trump’s $325 million.
“Everybody thought when Trump opened his reelection campaign the day of his inauguration that he would have a huge financial advantage,” said Brendan Fischer, a lawyer with the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center. “It seems like a lot of that money is gone.”
The president, meanwhile, has cut payments to the firm of Bill Stepien, who was promoted from deputy campaign manager to the top job in mid-July, from $15,000 a month to $10,000 a month, starting with July’s payment.
Bradley Parscale, the previous campaign manager whose consulting firm had been receiving $47,797 a month from the Trump campaign for the past year, saw that figure drop to $32,797 in August. It was unclear from the FEC filings whether that was a reduction...
