President Donald Trump’s re-election attempt has been pulling in huge amounts of marketing campaign coins — and making a few interesting choices approximately the way to spend it.
A wide array of expenses — from chandelier leases to payments to Trump groups, to campaign leak prevention gadgets, even a subscription to a newspaper Trump has denounced as an enemy of the American people — inform the tale of wherein Trump’s donor cash is going.
The president’s 2020 campaign filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission late Monday, disclosing what it and the Trump Victory Committee — a joint-fundraising attempt with the Republican National Committee (RNC) — raised and spent within the 2nd zone of 2019.
$26 at McDonald’s and $16,050 on rented chandeliers
Trump has taken to serving speedy food from McDonald’s and other chain restaurants to sports groups that go to the White House. He does it as a signifier of thriftiness, but also as a cultural identifier for his supporters who like to consider the president as a champion of the “everyman.”
But whilst Trump’s re-election effort has spent simply $26 at McDonald’s to this point, it shelled out $16,050 to Signature Chandeliers, a Florida agency that rents out high-stop lights for posh activities. A query to the campaign about the purpose of the chandelier expenditure went unanswered on the time of ebook.
Big donors, small donors, and felony bills
Trump promised to faucet his intended billion-dollar fortune to self-fund his 2016 election attempt but contributed simply $66 million of the $350.7 million in marketing campaign finances raised. That becomes more often than not cash from large members, but also covered a sizeable quantity of small-greenback donors — a group he hopes to make bigger upon.
Trump’s 2020 campaign has spent over $39 million at the attempt to assist increase small-dollar donations, and he raked in nearly $8 million in the last area, in step with a tally inside the New York Times. In truth, 35% of Trump’s $ sixty-eight million 2d-region haul came from donations of less than $2 hundred.
That stated the Trump re-election attempt has no shortage of wealthy donors. Twelve people gave the most allowed mixed donation of $360,000 to the unique Trump 2020 campaign committees.
A massive portion of that cash is for the marketing campaign’s prison bills: The re-election attempt spent nearly $1.Five million on felony consulting, almost one million dollars of which went to Jones Day, the identical white-shoe regulation company that former White House recommend Don McGahn joined in advance this 12 months. This quantity to about one in 10 dollars spent by using the marketing campaign final quarter.
Spent over $350,000 in 3 months at Trump residences
Trump’s marketing campaign and the joint fundraising committee with the RNC spent $358,231.24 at Trump houses and companies. This consists of almost $130,000 at Mar-a-Lago, over $one hundred and five,000 on the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., and heaps of dollars at different Trump motels and restaurants. The re-election effort also paid a complete of $32,137 for “legal & IT consulting” to The Trump Corporation. A question to the marketing campaign as to the nature of this consulting went unanswered at the time of book.
