Money concerns are very real for Trump's campaign — an unusual predicament for a sitting president, and one that worries veteran Republican operatives, with Trump so far behind in swing states as the race climaxes. https://t.co/b6JYmEfBR5
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) September 7, 2020
I don’t believe it. he ran his campaign exactly like everything else he’s bankrupted. just surprising. https://t.co/nyiYQaRQqC
— kilgore trout, non mini-stroke haver (@KT_So_It_Goes) September 7, 2020
Spare a (fleeting) thought for the dilemma of the Trump court’s unofficial stenographer. On the one hand, Ms. Haberman will never have such a soft and richly rewarded role in the Biden White House. On the other, if the S.S. Trumptanic has cratered on its iceberg, who else has such a saleable stock of ready-made ‘Eyewitness to Infamy’ anecdotes already drafted for a quickie book contract?…
… His rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr., was relatively broke when he emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee this spring, and Mr. Trump and the Republican National Committee had a nearly $200 million cash advantage.
Five months later, Mr. Trump’s financial supremacy has evaporated. Of the $1.1 billon his campaign and the party raised from the beginning of 2019 through July, more than $800 million has already been spent. Now some people inside the campaign are forecasting what was once unthinkable: a cash crunch with less than 60 days until the election, according to Republican officials briefed on the matter…
Among the splashiest and perhaps most questionable purchases was a pair of Super Bowl ads the campaign reserved for $11 million, according to Advertising Analytics — more than it has spent on TV in some top battleground states. It was a vanity splurge that allowed Mr. Trump to match the billionaire Michael R. Bloomberg’s buy for the big game.
There was also a cascade of smaller choices that added up: The campaign hired a coterie of highly paid consultants (Mr. Trump’s former bodyguard and White House aide has been paid more than $500,000 by the R.N.C. since late 2017); spent $156,000 for planes to pull aerial banners in recent months; and paid nearly $110,000 to Yondr, a company that makes magnetic pouches used to store cellphones during fund-raisers so that donors could not secretly record Mr. Trump and leak his remarks…
Critics of the campaign’s management say the lavish spending was ineffective: Mr. Trump enters the fall trailing in most national and battleground state polls, and Mr. Biden has surpassed him as a fund-raising powerhouse, after posting a record-setting haul of nearly $365 million in August. The Trump campaign has not revealed its August fund-raising figure…
Nicholas Everhart, a Republican strategist who owns a firm specializing in placing political ads, said the $800 million spent so far shows the “peril of starting a re-election campaign just weeks after winning.”…
Every one of these grifters has been stealing from the till since the infamous day in 2016 when Putin’s interference first bought a ‘win’ for a complicit GOP, and now they’re squabbling over who should’ve showed a little more fiscal restraint.
C.R.E.A.M. Open Thread: The Failing Trump CampaignPost + Comments (97)