Trump’s Allies Are Burning 2024 Campaign Money on Legal Fees

Bill Allison
·5 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump is burning through money on legal fees so fast that it risks leaving him short of cash just when he will need it most — in a potential general election rematch against President Joe Biden next fall.

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The ex-president raised $54 million from donors the first six months of 2023, more than any other Republican candidate, but legal bills are emptying his coffers almost as fast as he fills them.

Nearly half of Trump’s January-to-June haul went to lawyers, $25.5 million, draining cash reserves left from the midterm cycle, according to Federal Election Commission filings. A person familiar with the finances of Trump’s committees said legal expenses were actually closer to $40 million.

Trump holds a commanding lead over his nearest challenger, Ron DeSantis, but the legal spending risks giving the Florida governor an opening to close the gap. DeSantis is in the midst of a campaign reboot and has promised a leaner operation after his own finances worried donors.

With polls showing Trump on a collision course with Biden, the bigger problem for Trump is that his coffers might again be bare when he needs funding the most. Biden doesn’t face a serious primary challenger and has been stockpiling cash by running a shoestring operation. That’s important because spending less now theoretically means more money to advertise in key battleground states like Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan, among others, next fall.

Disclosures from Trump’s array of federal committees reveal how his legal expenses have been depleting reserves when he should be building them and how the team has been moving money between different entities to defend the former president, his advisers and others caught up in the multiple indictments and investigations.

Trump’s committees and his allied super political action committee, Make America Great Again, Inc., ended June with more than $63 million in the bank, second only to the $109 million DeSantis has amassed.

Two entities, Save America and Make America Great Again PAC — which is separate from MAGA Inc. — are footing his legal fees. They ended June with only $4.2 million cash on hand, about enough to cover another month’s worth of costs. The expenditures forced Save America, which donated $60 million in 2022 to Trump’s super PAC, to ask for a refund. It got $12.3 million back.

To keep the entities paying his legal fees funded, Trump will have to divert about half the money he raises through a joint fundraising committee. From January to June, the joint fundraising committee transferred $29.2 million to Trump’s campaign and $2.2 million to his leadership PAC and ended June with $5.7 million cash on hand. The remainder was spent on fundraising expenses.

Defense Fund

Former Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb told Bloomberg Television’s “Balance of Power” that the former president’s legal costs could double to about $80 million as the cases proceed.

Trump has been indicted in federal court over his handling of classified documents and in New York state over alleged hush money payments to an adult film star. He’s bracing for an indictment in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s probe into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

In July, aides formed the Patriot Legal Defense Fund to help defray his associates’ legal expenses, which Trump has been covering from PAC money. The fund can raise money in unlimited amounts but deep-pocketed donors who contribute will have less to support his White House run.

“The weaponized Department of Justice has continued to go after innocent Americans because they worked for President Trump,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the campaign, said in a statement. “To protect these innocent people from financial ruin and prevent their lives from being completely destroyed, the leadership PAC contributed to their legal fees.”

Trump can also keep tapping his allied super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc. It had $31 million at the end of June after burning through 44% of its cash in the first six months of 2023.

It took in $14.6 million over that stretch with contributions including $1 million from New York Jets owner Robert Woody Johnson, but spent more than twice that, $37.9 million.

General Election

If Trump is the Republican nominee, the current high burn rate threatens to leave him cash strapped in the general election.

Trump would almost certainly enter the contest with less money than Biden, who raised $72 million in the second quarter and had $77 million in cash at the end of June.

Biden is running a lean campaign for now and won’t be forced to spend much for months, unlike Republicans who are throwing millions on advertisements, voter outreach and staff to prepare for a contentious primary.

Officials from Trump’s 2020 campaign blame early profligate spending for a cash crunch that prevented them from bombarding key battleground states with ads in the final stretch.

“We had two choices: We could either be out of money in October, like zero dollars in the campaign account in October or end the campaign with $150 million in debt. So we made that impossibly hard decision to pull ads down off the air in August because we couldn’t afford them,” former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said on the “Yes Labels” podcast last week.

--With assistance from Laura Davison and Mario Parker.

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