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Donald Trump’s legal battles have become the biggest cost for his election campaign as well as the greatest motivator for his grassroots supporters to donate, according to federal filings released late on Wednesday.
The former US president received his biggest influx of small donations on August 25, after he surrendered to authorities in Atlanta on felony charges that he sought to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia. His mugshot was released to the public, and the Trump campaign put the photo on T-shirts and mugs.
About 85,000 contributions were made, roughly 10 times more than Trump groups receive on a typical day, bringing in almost $4.3mn. Fundraising has also surged after news of each of the four criminal cases prosecutors brought against the former president last year.
But the Trump election effort has also spent more than $52mn on legal fees in 2023, about 30 per cent of what it raised, and many millions more than pro-Trump groups spent on traditional campaign functions such as online advertising, digital consulting and renting fundraising lists. The groups spent $166mn overall.
Trump, President Joe Biden and their affiliated super-political action committees raised comparable amounts in 2023, about $189mn and $202mn, respectively. But Biden groups have $118mn cash on hand, while Trump groups have just $66mn — a difference equal to the sum the latter have spent on legal advice.
Trump faces a civil case that threatens his business empire, as well as four criminal cases.
In the first of the criminal cases, in Manhattan, Trump was accused of falsifying business records to cover up “hush money” payments to a porn star before the 2016 election. In the second, Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents, including information on US nuclear programmes.
The third and fourth cases — one federal, one in Georgia — allege Trump conspired to subvert the 2020 election.
The former president has vigorously refuted all 91 criminal charges against him, attacked prosecutors bringing the cases and judges overseeing them and called them politically motivated.
“I’m being indicted for you,” Trump told supporters at a campaign rally last year.
Trump’s primary rivals and their donors have acknowledged that the former president has turned the court cases against him into a political weapon as Republicans have rallied around him.
Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who was once considered a strong threat to Trump in the Republican primaries, told the Christian Broadcasting Network in December that the indictments “sucked out a lot of oxygen” in the primary race. DeSantis dropped out in January after placing a distant second in the first contest in Iowa.
Nikki Haley, Trump’s remaining Republican rival, has sought to portray herself as the strongest candidate to challenge Biden.
“Under Donald Trump, Republicans lost in 2018, 2020 and 2022,” said Haley spokesperson Nachama Soloveichik in a statement this week. “With Trump spending all his campaign money and time on court cases and chaos, we can expect to add 2024 to the list.”
Trump’s legal troubles could continue to plague him in a general election against Biden.
Trump is leading Biden in seven swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — according to a recent Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll. But 53 per cent of the registered voters surveyed said they would be unwilling to vote for Trump if he were convicted of a crime.
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