Trump campaign donations surged after his felony conviction, giving him a financial edge over Biden, with $141 million raised in May alone.
Luke Hales and Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Donations to the Trump campaign poured in after the former president's felony conviction last month. And now, he has a huge cash advantage over Joe Biden.
For the month of May alone, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee raised a combined $141 million, The New York Times reported. Meanwhile, the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee brought in $85 million for the month, the campaign said.
To Trump's apparent advantage, he spent much of May in Manhattan federal court fighting 34 felony charges for falsifying business records related to his attempt to cover up an alleged affair with porn actress Stormy Daniels. And in the final two days of May — the day he was convicted on all counts and the day after — donations to his campaign surged dramatically.
On those two days, the Trump campaign raked in six times as many large donations as on an average day, Politico reported. And that surge is probably even higher because unitemized contributions under $200 aren't included, nor are ones that hadn't yet been transferred, according to Politico.
April was also a blockbuster month for Trump's fundraising efforts. He started out the month $100 million behind Biden, but by the end, his team had raised $25 million more than Biden's had for the month, according to the Times.
And now, Biden's longstanding cash advantage over Trump has been knocked out. At the end of May, Trump's campaign had $116.6 million on hand, while Biden's had $91.6 million, FEC filings show.
"President Trump's record-breaking fundraising numbers prove Crooked Joe Biden's witch hunts against President Trump, skyrocketing inflation, and the illegal border invasion have united the American people around the fact that another four years of Biden will mean the end of our country," the Trump campaign's communications director, Steven Cheung, said in a statement to Business Insider.
Still, the Biden campaign isn't doing too shabby.
The president's campaign said that May was its second-strongest grassroots month yet, with more than three million donors joining the effort. The Biden team said that combined with the DNC's funds, it had a war chest of $212 million at the start of June. The Trump campaign and the RNC have not tallied their total cash on hand for the same period, but a partial count shows they have a combined $170 million, the Times reported.
Biden has also been spending far more than Trump. In May, Biden's campaign spent $30 million, more than four times as much as Trump's, FEC filings show. Earlier this week, Biden announced a $50 million media blitz that includes a searing attack ad highlighting Trump's conviction.
"The money we continue to raise matters, and it's helping the campaign build out an operation that invests in reaching and winning the voters who will decide this election – a stark contrast to Trump's PR stunts and photo-ops that he's pretending is a campaign," Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the campaign manager for Biden-Harris 2024, said in a press release. "From person-to-person organizing to a historic paid media campaign, we're doing the work to reach and earn the votes needed to win in November."
