Trump’s Future: Tons of Cash and Plenty of Options for
Spending It
When
President Trump departs the White House, he will have a huge pile of cash to
fuel his future ambitions. He can hold rallies, hire staff and even lay
groundwork for a potential 2024 run.
By Shane
Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman
- Dec. 18,
2020Updated 6:50 p.m. ET
Donald J. Trump will exit the White
House as a private citizen next month perched atop a pile of campaign cash unheard-of
for an outgoing president, and with few legal limits on how he can spend it.
Deflated by a loss he has yet to
acknowledge, Mr. Trump has cushioned the blow by coaxing huge sums of money
from his loyal supporters — often under dubious pretenses — raising roughly
$250 million since Election Day along with the national party.
More than $60 million of that sum has
gone to a new political action committee, according to people familiar with the
matter, which Mr. Trump will control after he leaves office. Those funds, which
far exceed what previous outgoing presidents had at their disposal, provide him
with tremendous flexibility for his post-presidential ambitions: He could use
the money to quell rebel factions within the party, reward loyalists, fund his
travels and rallies, hire staff, pay legal bills and even lay the groundwork
for a far-from-certain 2024 run.
The post-election
blitz of fund-raising has cemented Mr. Trump’s position as an unrivaled force
and the pre-eminent fund-raiser of the Republican Party even in defeat. His
largest single day for online donations actually came after Election Day —
raising almost $750,000 per hour on Nov. 6. So did his second biggest day. And
his third.
“Right now, he is the
Republican Party,” said John McLaughlin, a Republican pollster who worked on
Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign. “The party knows that virtually every dollar
they’ve raised in the last four years, it’s because of Donald Trump.”
During the campaign, many of the large
expenditures, like television and digital ad buys, were routed through a
secretive L.L.C. called American Made Media Consultants. That allowed the Trump
campaign and its joint committee with the national party to effectively shield
many details of its spending, including who was being paid and how much. More
than $700 million has gone through the L.L.C. since the beginning of 2019.
What no one knew was that the L.L.C.
represented yet another intermingling of Mr. Trump’s political, financial and
familial interests. New documents
reviewed by The New York Times show that Lara Trump, Mr. Trump’s
daughter-in-law and a senior campaign adviser, served on the board — and was
named on drafts of the incorporation papers. So was John Pence, the nephew of
Vice President Mike Pence and a senior Trump adviser.
Tim Murtaugh, a
spokesman for Mr. Trump, said both Ms. Trump and Mr. Pence resigned from the
board in October 2019. “There was never any ethical or legal reason why they
could not serve on the board in the first place,’’ he said. He added that
neither was paid for being on the board.
American Made Media Consultants was the
subject of a complaint to the Federal Election Commission this year that
accused it of “laundering” funds to obscure the ultimate beneficiary of Trump
campaign spending. Filings show the vast majority of funds were spent after Ms.
Trump resigned from the board. The complaint is pending.
For Mr. Trump, the quarter-billion
dollars he and the party raised over six weeks is enough to pay off all of his
remaining campaign bills and to fund his fruitless legal challenges and still
leave tens of millions of dollars.
Mr. Trump’s plans, however, remain extremely fluid. His refusal to accept Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory has stunted internal political planning, aides say, with some advisers in his shrinking circle of confidants hesitant to even approach him about setting a course of action for 2021 and beyond.
Those who have spoken with Mr. Trump
say he appears shrunken, and over his job; this detachment is reflected in a
Twitter feed that remains stubbornly more focused on unfounded allegations of
fraud than on the death toll from the raging pandemic.
Mr. Trump has talked about running
again in 2024 — but he also may not. He has created this new PAC, but a
different political entity could still be in the works, people involved in the
discussions said. Talk of counterprogramming Mr. Biden’s inauguration with a
splashy event or an announcement of his own is currently on hold.
Mr. Trump had been
tentatively planning to go to Georgia on Saturday, according to a senior
Republican official, to support the two Republicans in Senate runoff races
there. But he is still angry at the state’s Republican governor and secretary
of state for accepting the election result, and simply doesn’t want to make the
trip. There is some discussion about him going after the Christmas holiday.
Still, the Trump political apparatus
has taken advantage of the grass-roots energy and excitement over the two
runoffs to juice its own fund-raising. Email and text solicitations have
pitched Trump supporters to give to a “Georgia Election Fund,” even though no
funds go directly to either Republican senator on the ballot, irritating some Senate G.O.P. strategists.
Instead, the fine print shows 75
percent of the donations to the Georgia fund go to Mr. Trump’s new PAC, called
Save America, with 25 percent to the Republican National Committee.
After weeks of shouting “FRAUD” to
supporters in emails and asking them to back an “Election Defense Fund” (which
also sent 75 percent of donations to his new PAC), the Trump operation has
subtly shifted its tone and focus, returning to more sustainable pre-election
themes, like hawking signed hats and opposing socialism.
Mr. Trump and the
R.N.C. did spend about $15 million combined in legal costs and other spending
related to disputing the election between Oct. 15 and Nov. 23, according to
federal records.
Even some of his biggest post-election
spending that his campaign labeled recount-related was routed through the
L.L.C. that Ms. Trump served on the board of, including $2.2 million for “SMS
advertising,” better known as text messaging.
For a sense of scale
of just how much money Mr. Trump will have at his disposal, the new Trump PAC’s
$60 million-plus haul — and counting — is about as much money as he spent
to win his party’s presidential nomination in 2016.
Some campaign finance experts have
speculated that Mr. Trump might try to use the excess of cash in his new PAC,
formally known as a leadership PAC, to pay for his own personal future legal
quagmires, as he faces investigations once he leaves office. (A senior Trump
adviser said they don’t expect the money to be used for personal legal needs.)
“A leadership PAC is a slush fund,”
said Meredith McGehee, executive director of Issue One, a group that supports
increased political transparency. “There are very, very, very few limits on
what he can’t spend money on.”
In the last five years, Mr. Trump has
never shied from spending hundreds of thousands of dollars from his
contributors on his private businesses, a practice he could continue or expand
while out of office.
Just since mid-October, the Trump
Victory Committee, a joint account operated with the R.N.C., has paid more than
$710,000 to the Trump Hotel Collection, while his re-election account has
continued to pay more than $37,000 per month to rent space in Trump Tower.
It is not clear where his
post-presidential operation will be based or who will run it, although several
advisers expect it will be in Florida, where he is planning to move.
But as a former president, Mr. Trump
will be allocated a certain amount of taxpayer money for staff and office space
for life after leaving the White House, and he is beginning to have discussions
about which aides from the West Wing will accompany him.
His senior political
advisers — Bill Stepien, Justin Clark and Jason Miller, among others — are
among those who may stay involved with him politically.
While Mr. Trump’s post-presidency
remains largely shapeless, he has demonstrated his desire to exert his control
on national politics, especially among Republicans.
He has already endorsed Ronna McDaniel,
a close ally, to serve another term as chair of the R.N.C. He has floated
primary challenges to Republicans, such as Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, who have
crossed him by rejecting his baseless theories of election fraud. He has even
asked aides how he can retain control of the party if he isn’t a candidate.
One person close to
Mr. Trump said that he has sounded less certain about declaring he’s running in
2024 than he had just two weeks ago. That uncertainty is causing anxiety for a
number of advisers and aides to the president, some of whom might join other
campaigns but are stuck in limbo until Mr. Trump makes up his mind. Announcing
for president would trigger tighter rules on Mr. Trump’s political spending and
added financial disclosures, including of Mr. Trump’s personal finances, that
simply operating a PAC would not.
Mr. Trump’s future ambitions have also
created a cloud over who exactly will control some of the most valuable assets
from the 2020 campaign, including Mr. Trump’s lengthy list of supporters from
whom he has raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Both the R.N.C. and Mr.
Trump are entitled to some of this valuable voter data, and efforts at
“decoupling” the data are underway but expected to last months.
“There’s no bully pulpit as large as
the presidency, but nevertheless, President Trump is likely to play a
significant role in the future of the Republican Party,” said Whit Ayres, a
Republican pollster. “It’s very difficult to imagine him following the same
pattern as George W. Bush, Barack Obama and other presidents have followed in
keeping their mouths shut and letting the new president try to govern.”
