Trump Starts Fundraising as Campaign's Costly Homestretch Awaits

Trump Starts Fundraising as Campaign's Costly Homestretch Awaits

http://gdb.voanews.com/FF848455-2B8E...4_cy5_cw93.jpg
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is joined by his wife Melania, right, daughter Ivanka, left, as he speaks during a primary night news conference, Tuesday, May 3, 2016.

RELATED ARTICLES

• Republicans Struggle With Reality of Trump Nomination
  
• Prominent Issues Divide Trump, Clinton in Race for White House
  
• Former Presidents Bush Will Not Endorse Trump
  
• Clinton, Sanders Fight for Last Big Prize: California

Ken Bredemeier
Last updated on: May 05, 2016 3:43 PM

WASHINGTON—After largely self-funding his run to the U.S. Republican presidential nomination, billionaire Donald Trump is starting efforts to raise money for his race against the likely Democratic nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Trump said he contributed about $44 million to his months-long campaign to capture the Republican nomination, while collecting another $12 million in relatively small donations from supporters. But Thursday, he named a campaign finance chief, Steven Mnuchin, chief of a private investment firm, to oversee a national fundraising effort for what could be a billion-dollar campaign.

Trump often bragged to his supporters that he was the only 2016 presidential candidate who was self-funding, even it was somewhat of an exaggerated claim since he also accepted donations.

Now he has acknowledged that he would have to sell some of his extensive real estate holdings, something he says he does not necessarily want to do, to muster the hundreds of millions of dollars needed for the national campaign against Clinton.

Even so, Trump said in a statement that he would be "putting up substantial money toward the general election."

http://gdb.voanews.com/D5E06FCF-F8C3..._w640_r1_s.jpg
Supporters of U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump hold their hands to their chest as the national anthem is played at a campaign rally in Concord, New Hampshire, Jan. 18, 2016. As the only Republican left in the field, Trump has now all but clinched the Republican party's nomination.

Numerous wealthy individuals who normally contribute to Republican presidential candidates have been slow to embrace Trump; nearly all of them have been supporting contenders whom Trump defeated. Trump is a political novice who captured the hearts and votes of a sizable portion of the Republican electorate in state nominating contests, but establishment party figures have given him tepid support.

Trump, a brash, onetime television reality show host, said he is putting together a committee to help him choose his vice presidential running mate.

Clinton has not clinched the Democratic nomination, but is significantly ahead of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, her lone challenger.

http://gdb.voanews.com/8D2FB132-3D30..._cy5_cw100.jpg
FILE - Democratic presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton (R) and Sen. Bernie Sanders, are seen standing together before the start of a Democratic presidential debate at Miami-Dade College, Florida, March 9, 2016. Even though he is trailing Clinton in delegates, Sanders has pledged to stay in the primary race.

​Sanders says he has no plans to quit before the final primary votes have been cast in June. He would need to win a huge majority of the vote in the remaining states in order to catch Clinton, who leads him by about 300 pledged delegates to the party's national nominating convention and has hundreds more superdelegates, mostly party officials, pledging to support her.

A number of polls show Clinton favored to beat Trump if the election were held now.

http://www.voanews.com/content/trump...h/3316413.html

Hillary
you should be in jail you lie & you kill our 4 guy

Sending good thoughts and prayers to Trump and his family that the money will come 10 fold!!!

Make America Great Again. This is a call to Duty to all you Patriotic Americans that are loaded and care about our Country, our future, your children's future! Please support Trump and get the money and support rolling!

Our citizens have served and fought and died for you, our workers have helped make your business a success.

We live in the greatest country on Earth, please help stop the waste, fraud, abuse of our money and stop the invasion of our Country...please donate to Trump for us!!!

Yes, I want him to stop using his own money and I don't want him to have to sell one of his beautiful properties. I would rather all his supporters start sending in some money and that he run a nice cheap economical campaign like he did in the primary. There's no reason on this earth while a general election campaign should cost $1 billion. That's disgusting.

Will Donald Trump Get Back The $38 Million He Lent His Campaign?


3:50Queue

May 4, 20164:34 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered

PETER OVERBY

http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2016...-s1200-c85.jpg
The apparent Republican nominee, Donald Trump, at Trump Tower in Manhattan on the night of his victory in Indiana.

View Press/Corbis via Getty Images

Donald Trump likes to say he is self-funding his campaign. That isn't entirely true. He has actually lent his campaign about three-quarters of the $49 million or so that he has spent so far.

That means the campaign can pay him back if it has the money. But there's a deadline. Trump has 11 weeks to repay himself — exactly at the moment when he needs to pivot and start raising cash for the general election campaign.

The loans began more than two months before his announcement speech last June, when he said, "I'm using my own money. I'm not using the lobbyists. I'm not using donors. I don't care." He paused. "I'm really rich."

Trump had lent the campaign nearly $38 million as of March 31. It's not much in the grand scheme of "really rich" candidates. Mitt Romney, for example, lent his 2008 primary campaign $44 million.

Romney later converted the loans into campaign contributions, something Trump may do as well. But the fact that Trump chose to make loans, not contributions, suggests he at least has hopes of getting repaid.

And here's where it gets complicated for the apparent nominee. Fundraising to repay candidate loans is regulated in two ways.

"If he wants that money back, he needs to raise it in $2,700 chunks before the convention, and make that repayment from his campaign committee to his personal bank account," said campaign finance lawyer Paul S. Ryan, at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.

The $2,700 limit applies to all contributions to federal candidates. The deadline was imposed by Congress in 2002, to prevent situations where lobbyists' money was going directly into the personal accounts of newly elected lawmakers.

Looking ahead, Trump's general election campaign could easily cost $750 million or more, 15 to 20 times what he has spent on the primaries. So the fundraising pressure is on.

The campaign hasn't laid out clear plans for raising that money or for dealing with the candidate loans. Trump discussed fundraising strategy Wednesday morning, on MSNBC's Morning Joe.

"Do I want to sell a couple of buildings and self-fund? I don't know that I want to do that necessarily, but I really won't be asking for money for myself; I'll be asking money for the party," he said.

He also got on the phone with ABC's Good Morning America, saying his campaign will be seeking general-election contributions up to the $2,700 legal limit. "We will probably take small contributions," he said. "We will take the limits. I don't want big contributions."

Trump strategist Paul Manafort explained the limits of Trump's self-funding last week on the Laura Ingraham Show.

"Now when it comes to the general election, we're no longer running as an individual," Manafort said. "We're running as the head of a ticket. And so the party itself will be doing some things to raise money, and Mr. Trump has indicated he'd be willing to help the party."

Thus, if Trump wants to recover his loans, he'll have to do debt-retirement fundraising at the same time that he solicits wealthy donors for Republican Party committees.

The national committees have much higher contribution limits than do candidate committees. For the Republican National Committee, the per donor cap is $333,400 a year.

The Trump campaign didn't respond to requests for comment.

If Trump decides against converting the loans to contributions, attorney Ryan says the GOP's priorities for him would be obvious: "(a) campaigning for president, (b) raising money for the general election to be spent down the road, not (c) raising money to repay loans I've made to myself and money spent months ago in order to actually get the nomination."

Trump has yet to say whether these are his priorities too.

http://www.npr.org/2016/05/04/476783...ign-38-million