Tuesday Reads: Donald Trump is Broke

Trump pinata

Good Afternoon!!

Last night Twitter was agog over Donald Trump’s May FEC filing. There’s been a lot of talk lately about chaos in Trump’s campaign and speculation about how wealthy he actually is. But the Trump campaign is in even worse condition than anyone suspected. Mother Jones breaks down the stunning news from his campaign finance documents:

The first glance: Hillary Clinton’s campaign has more than 35 times the cash Trump’s does.

Here’s the second glance: Ted Cruz dropped out of the GOP primary on May 3, meaning that for the month of May, Trump was all but assured the nomination and the campaign should have been in prime fundraising mode. But it wasn’t. Even taking into account Trump’s long-stated claims that he had no interest in raising money from others (something he has reversed himself on)—filings the campaign made with the Federal Election Commission late Monday evening show that Trump simply couldn’t get any fundraising momentum going. He raised a grand total of $5.6 million from May 1 to May 31, $2.2 million of which was in the form of loans from Trump personally….

Trump, who spent more than he raised, has $1.2 million in cash on hand. True, Trump has always had very little cash on hand at the end of a reporting period. But this was because he was writing the checks and didn’t need to keep cash on hand. But now that Trump insists he won’t be self-financing, those low numbers are a problem. Even if Trump significantly increased his fundraising since May 31, he would have to be raising money at an almost unprecedented rate to catch up to Clinton.

It’s not just the low numbers that portend potential disaster for the GOP’s man. It’s the way he arrives at the low numbers that looks scary. There’s no real significant support from top donors—the bedrock of a strong monthly fundraising report. But the Trump campaign picked up just 133 donations that hit the maximum allowed amount of $2,700. Clinton had more donations of $2,700 on just May 17 (140) than Trump had all month, and almost 15 times as many for the entire month (1,981).

More from Think Progress: Trump Said He Had ‘More Cash Than Any Campaign In The History Of Politics.’ That Was A Huge Lie.

Not only is Trump getting lapped by Clinton financially, but his fundraising has been going so poorly that he’s actually behind a good number of U.S. House candidates….

The news sparked renewed concerns that Trump simply won’t be able to fundraise to the extent necessary to run a viable presidential campaign. But during a phone interview on the Today show Tuesday morning, Trump said that if worst comes to worst and Republican donors don’t come around, he could always just self-fund.

“If it gets to a point, what I’ll do is just do what I did in the primaries. I spent $55 million of my own money to win the primaries,” Trump said. “I may do that again in the general election… I have a lot of cash and I may do it again in the general election, but it would be nice to have some help from the party.”

But if he has so much cash, why isn’t he spending it instead of having to deal with being the butt of endless jokes in the media and on Twitter?

Josh Marshall posted this piece before the FEC filings came out: The Real News Is Trump is Broke.

I got onto thinking about this when I saw John McQuaid’s short piece in Forbes. As McQuaid notes, this is the gaping hole, the burning question at the center of Trump’s campaign. Reports suggest that Trump has been unwilling to undergo the ego effacement of calling high dollar Republican donors and asking for money. His campaign has virtually no money in the bank ($2.4m at last count).

Even if Trump can’t not be Trump, the damage of being Trump could at least be off-set by pouring money into advertising in key swing states and field work. But at this moment, the Clinton campaign (and pro-Clinton superPACs) is rolling out a barrage of targeted swing state advertising focused on solidifying and embedding the highly negative image Trump has built for himself over the last year and especially the last eight weeks. That advertising is going entirely unanswered by the Trump campaign.

Why isn’t Trump using his own money, as he keeps threatening to do?

It may take a billion dollars to run a presidential campaign. But at this moment Trump is in dire need of a few million dollars. To go back to cash on hand, Trump currently has $2.4 million and Clinton has just over $30 million. Remember, Trump is allegedly worth $10 billion, which at the risk of stating the obvious means he is worth ten thousand million dollars. Someone in that position might be hard pressed to quickly produce billions of dollars or even hundreds of million in actual cash. But we’re talking tens of millions or even just a few million dollars he needs right now.

Trump may be stingy. He may be saying that the RNC should take responsibility for fundraising, which is something it’s clearly not capable of doing. (The RNC has massive fundraising capacity but it can’t simply take on singlehanded what the candidate was expected to raise.) But as big a disaster as Trump’s campaign is at the moment he stands a real shot at being the next president of the United States. It is simply not credible that he is standing on principle in not giving his campaign any more money at such a critical moment when his bid is being so deeply damaged.

The only credible answer is that it is difficult or perhaps even impossible for him to produce these comparatively small sums. If that’s true, his claim to be worth billions of dollars must either be a pure sham and a fraud or some artful concoction of extreme leverage and accounting gimmickry, which makes it impossible to come up with actual cash.

Here’s Marshall’s reaction to the FEC report (emphasis added):