Trump may use $100 million of own money on campaign as Biden donations surge

Donald Trump is considering putting $100 million of his personal cash into his reelection campaign against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday morning.

The news that Trump is mulling whether to self-finance his reelection bid comes one day after the New York Times reported on the lavish and wasteful ways his campaign has spent more than $800 million of the $1.1 billion it raised over the course of nearly two years — leaving Republicans worried that Trump won’t have enough money in the final weeks of the race.

According to the New York Times, the Trump campaign paid aides large salaries and made a series of smaller questionable purchases that added up, including $156,000 on planes to pull banners across the sky and $110,000 on magnetic pouches for cell phones that would block donors from recording Trump at private fundraisers. The Trump campaign also spent $1 million on ads in the Washington, D.C., media market in order to boost Trump’s spirits while he watches cable news from the White House.

Meanwhile, Biden and the Democratic National Committee are posting massive fundraising numbers, bringing in a whopping $365 million in the month of August, the biggest monthly fundraising haul ever in the history of political campaigns.

Of course, Trump has lied in the past about self-funding his political bid.

In 2016, Trump said he would spend up to $1 billion on his campaign, but only wound up putting in $66 million, according to reports at the time. Some of that money went to salaries for his own family members, as well as his businesses.

It’s unclear if Trump even has $100 million in cash to put into his campaign. Bloomberg News reported that Trump’s net wealth fell by $300 million over the last year and that he likely had between $47.6 million and $156.5 million in liquid assets at the end of 2019.

But Trump himself seems to have earned millions from his campaign, as well as from fundraisers hosted by the Republican National Committee and other GOP candidates at his properties. As of July, political spending at Trump properties added up to more than $22 million, CNN reported.

Trump has also pocketed money from taxpayers from the hundreds of visits he’s made to his own properties over the past three-and-a-half years, as members of the Secret Service book hotel rooms and golf carts at those properties.

Trump on Tuesday sought to defend his campaign’s lavish spending and possible cash crunch as voters across the country begin to cast ballots with eight weeks remaining before Election Day.

“My Campaign spent a lot of money up front in order to compensate for the false reporting and Fake News concerning our handling of the China Virus,” Trump tweeted. “Now they see the GREAT job we have done, and we have 3 times more than we had 4 years ago – & are up in polls. Lots of $’s & ENERGY!”

Trump is not up in the polls.

He is currently trailing Biden by 7.5 points nationally, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average, and is also losing almost every critical swing state to Biden.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.