How Trump Is Scrambling to Raise Cash

As many as three nights a week, Donald Trump has been hosting private dinners at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, schmoozing with some of the Republican Party’s biggest financiers as he races to address a sizable cash shortfall against President Joe Biden.

There is no request for money from the attendees at these meals, which have included Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, and Pepe Fanjul, a sugar magnate, according to people familiar with the sessions. But advisers to Trump’s campaign and his super political action committees hope the charm offensive will eventually pay political and financial dividends.

One of the most pressing issues facing Trump is the financial disparity he and allied groups now face with Biden and the Democratic Party. Democrats have boasted of entering February with $130 million. The Trump operation did not release a full total, but his campaign account and the Republican National Committee had around $40 million.

Trump enters the general election ahead of Biden in public polls. But Biden has taken full advantage of one of the benefits of incumbency, both socking away cash and building out a political operation earlier than his challenger.

Despite years of professing massive wealth and boasting of his desire to “drain the swamp,” the deeply transactional former president is leaning yet again on the cash of others, turning Mar-a-Lago into a staging ground for billionaires and others with their own agendas. One potential leverage point with the biggest GOP financiers is the package of tax cuts Trump signed into law in 2017. Many of those cuts expire at the end of 2025, and Biden has vowed not to extend them for the nation’s highest earners.

Money often winds up mattering less in presidential races than in down-ballot races. Voters pay attention to the candidates naturally, especially Trump, and the key states all wind up awash in advertising by the fall.

Yet recent presidential contests have been so excruciatingly close that everything has mattered, and Trump is preparing to face an especially large avalanche of Democratic spending this year. Just a single union this past week announced plans to spend $200 million, 10 times what the main Trump super PAC had on hand. A cash edge can help Democrats tilt or expand the battleground map in their favor.

In a sign of the Trump orbit’s urgent need for cash, at least two donors who made seven-figure pledges to support Trump this year were nudged to see if they could cut an eight-figure check — meaning $10 million or more — instead, according to a person familiar with the request.

It is an unusually perilous moment for Trump.

The former president is facing converging financial crunches just as he has become the presumptive Republican nominee. The first is the political cash situation. The others are far more personal.

Trump recently posted a $91.6 million bond in a civil case in which he was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation of New York writer E. Jean Carroll. He also must summon the resources to post a roughly $450 million bond, the judgment in a New York civil fraud case against his businesses, in the coming days. And he has mounting legal bills as his first criminal trial nears. Trump’s Save America PAC, which has been paying his lawyers and those of some witnesses, is set to run dry by summer at the current pace of spending.

Some Trump allies predict they will have enough campaign cash to win, even if it’s less than Biden.

“Hillary Clinton way out-raised President Trump, but he connected with the American people and that was the difference right there,” said Tommy Hicks Jr., a former Republican National Committee co-chair and finance director.

Brian Ballard, a Republican lobbyist, fundraiser and Mar-a-Lago member, said Trump was “incredibly engaged” in the political money fight.

“He understands the one advantage the Biden campaign has is financial resources,” Ballard said, adding “and he understands we need to do all we can to negate that.”

To prepare for the fall, Trump’s advisers have embarked on an aggressive and speedy takeover of the RNC that included installing his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair, with the intention that she’ll focus in part on shoring up fundraising. The Trump team imposed mass layoffs in some departments Monday, and is shipping all of the party’s finance and digital fundraising staff to the former president’s Florida headquarters by the end of the month.

In a sign of the early Democratic edge, Biden traveled to Wisconsin this past week to promote the 44 party and campaign offices they are opening in the state, at the same time Trump’s team was laying off or forcing the RNC’s regional political staff to reapply for their jobs.

For now, the Trump operation is ramping up its program for bundlers of midsize donations and planning to conserve cash by holding fewer rallies than they did at the end of the primary season.

On Thursday, Trump formed a new joint fundraising account with the national party and roughly 40 state parties, calling it the Trump 47 Committee, allowing him to directly raise money in chunks of more than $800,000. A splashy dinner in Palm Beach is being planned in early April to fill the new account’s coffers. One person familiar with the planning said donors have pledged more than $25 million.

Trump is said to be concerned about the fundraising gap between his orbit and Biden’s, although he has told advisers that he believes he and his allies will ultimately raise what they need, according to one person with knowledge of the discussions.

But some top donors remain hesitant. Among their privately expressed concerns is a fear that large donations could wind up covering Trump’s legal fees, even as his advisers have publicly said the RNC won’t do so. Trump’s main super PAC has, as of January, refunded more than $47 million of the $60 million it had received before the 2024 run began to Trump’s PAC, which is paying Trump’s lawyers.

So far, Trump has reported only a limited well of major contributors during the 2024 race. He has, in the meantime, become increasingly attentive to them.

He recently had a meeting with one of the world’s richest men, Elon Musk, and a brief backstage encounter with Jeff Yass, a billionaire investor in TikTok. Trump said on CNBC that he and Yass had not spoken about the company, although he later posted on social media regarding his skepticism about federal legislation that could ban the app, especially if it would benefit the parent company of Facebook.

On Super Tuesday, Trump’s main super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., rented out a room at Mar-a-Lago for some of the larger donors to mingle in. Trump stopped by and thanked some of them, including Trish Duggan, a prominent Florida philanthropist and Scientologist, who has contributed more than $5 million, according to a person who was in the room.

The night he won the New Hampshire primary, Trump gave shout-outs in his victory speech to casino magnate Steve Wynn and hedge fund manager John Paulson, both of whom are billionaires.

“You know what? Put him at Treasury,” Trump said of Paulson that night. The April fundraising dinner, which was first reported by Bloomberg, will be hosted by Paulson.

On the night of the South Carolina primary, Woody Johnson, the billionaire owner of the New York Jets to whom Trump gave an ambassadorship during his term, stood behind Trump.

Another billionaire and regular at Mar-a-Lago, Ike Perlmutter, is supporting a separate super PAC, Right for America, that is being run by Trump ally Sergio Gor. Trump blessed Perlmutter’s effort, despite the fact that its existence has caused tension within the broader Trump circle.

The general election cash chasm was apparent in the advertising announced in March.

The main Trump super PAC has purchased about $380,000 in radio advertising targeting Black voters in three states this month. The Biden campaign has announced a $30 million ad campaign over six weeks — a nearly 100 to 1 edge in the first stretch of the race.

That ratio does not include the roughly $500,000 the pro-Trump super PAC spent on an ad that trolled Biden the day of his State of the Union speech, questioning whether the president would live to 2029, when his second term would end. The provocative commercial exemplifies what underfunded groups typically do: spend symbolically to generate free media coverage.

Some Republican donors have emphasized that wealthy contributors may write large checks, but they often don’t want to see that fact disclosed, given the controversy that attaches itself to Trump. A number of donors faced public blowback in 2016 for their support.

An official with the Trump super PAC would not say whether Yass has given money to the group, but a person close to the campaign said he is expected to make a seven-figure contribution. It’s unclear if that would be to a super PAC or a dark money group that does not have to identify its donors.

After Musk’s meeting with Trump was reported, Musk wrote, “I am not donating money to either candidate for US President.” But should he choose to donate, Musk, too, could decide to give to an entity in which the money cannot be tracked.

Not everyone is on board just yet.

“Can I just have a moment to be sad over Nikki not being in the race?” hedge fund executive and GOP financier Ken Griffin said at a conference in Florida this past week, referring to Trump’s last major Republican rival, Nikki Haley. But Griffin predicted that Trump would win this fall and left open the possibility of backing him.

The current financial situation is a reversal of the one in 2020.

Back then, it was Trump who held the White House and had amassed a $187 million advantage by roughly this same point, creating a far larger gap than Biden has built now. But spending decisions by the Trump team and a deluge of Democratic giving inverted that by the fall.

The Republican National Committee announced that last weekend — the first since Michael Whatley was installed as chair, and Lara Trump as co-chair — was its strongest for a fundraising weekend since 2020. Lara Trump said on Fox News that she had personally received pledges of $2.7 million.

And a Trump campaign spokesperson said that February had been its strongest month for small dollar fundraising of the race. Records show the previous high for online fundraising was in August, when Trump raised $22.3 million.

Still, Democratic donors have been pouring money into Biden’s coffers. The Biden campaign announced it had raised more than $10 million online in the 24 hours after the State of the Union address.

To put that sum in perspective, it more than doubled the biggest day Trump had in 2023, when his mug shot was released from his Georgia indictment, and he raised $4.2 million online.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .