We all know Donald Trump is currently hemorrhaging money faster than a Trump-branded casino, but when he starts spending more on legal fees than McDonald’s, hair spray, and face makeup combined, you know things are getting serious.
According to a new CNBC report, the Yellin’ Felon has spent gaudy—one might even say eye-popping—sums on legal expenses each and every day over the past few years, and his adoring throngs have been footing much of that bill.
CNBC reports that since leaving the White House in 2020, Trump has used an obscure campaign finance law loophole to cover his growing legal costs. Those costs amount to an eye-popping $90,000 per day for the past three years, according to Federal Elections Commission filings.
Ninety-thousand dollars? Every day?! That’s a lot of McNuggets, man. Fortunately for Trump, Republican donors are paying for most of his criminal and civil shenanigans. And whether they know that or not is largely beside the point—because it’s all perfectly legal.
In fact, other politicians do the same thing on occasion (President Joe Biden used some DNC money to defend himself in his classified documents probe), but few have ever found themselves as legally entangled as Trump is now.
Campaign disclosures show Trump has used a web of political action committees, or PACs, to funnel donor money to a leadership PAC he founded called Save America, which is primarily paying his legal bills. These groups are separate from his official campaign and not subject to the same restrictions by the FEC.
“This has been a problem for years, if not decades,” said Saurav Ghosh, director of campaign finance at the Campaign Legal Center. “Leadership PACs are often used by candidates and officeholders as kind of a slush fund to pay for whatever they want without really any oversight.”
Of course, as we’ve seen in recent election cycles, presidential campaigns and related PACs spend gobs of cash to push their candidates over the finish line. So those numbers represent a fraction of the Trump team’s overall spending—but it’s a pretty sizable fraction. For example, campaign finance records from March show that 26% of the expenditures from Trump’s political committees went to legal fees—compared to the roughly 1% for the special ops team that follows Eric around to keep him from eating sidewalk gum and falling down manholes.
In other words, this alleged billionaire is spending a fuckton of other people’s money on things that have very little to do with improving the lives of small-dollar donors, who account for a considerable percentage of his overall campaign funding. (Trump is smart enough to know that big-dollar donors’ largesse will likely flow back to them in the form of Trump corruption, but he’s apparently not quite smart enough to stop short of explicitly making that connection.)
This is hardly Trump’s first grift, of course.
Remember after the 2020 election, when Trump (in)famously solicited donations for an Election Defense Fund that didn’t actually exist? The victims of his Big Lie included everyone who wanted to continue to live in a Western-style democracy, but his phony Election Defense Fund was all about fleecing his friends and supporters.
The Guardian recounts the spate of emails Trump sent out in the aftermath of the 2020 election begging his supporters to keep Democrats from stealing his “victory.” But in what could be seen as an admission that he knew he was lying and there were no nefarious operators to defend his fake landslide win against, he never actually created an election defense fund.
There was only one problem with this epic flurry of emails: the Official Election Defense Fund did not exist. As the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol revealed in a public hearing this week, Trump and his allies raised $250m from the emails by persuading loyal followers to donate to a chimera.
There was no fund dedicated to fighting election battles as part of Trump’s mendacious and ultimately vain “big lie” that the presidency had been stolen from him. Instead, the money went into Trump’s new fundraising entity Save America Pac, from where millions of dollars were distributed to pro-Trump organizations including his own hotel properties and the company that produced the Ellipse rally in Washington on January 6 just hours before the storming of the Capitol.
As Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a member of the House Jan. 6 committee, said at the time this was all revealed, “The Big Lie was also a big ripoff.”
But one grift at a time is never enough for Trump. He needs multiple revenue streams to keep his long con going.
Take Trump Media & Technology Group stock. The company has fundamentals that would suggest it’s worth maybe $2 a share, and yet folks are still scooping those shares up at close to $40 a pop. Many of these investors may simply like Trump and be willing to spend their hard-earned dollars to prop him up—and others are likely betting on Trump winning in November and making Truth Social a de facto state media outlet. But some of these folks are already well on their way to the abattoir and have no idea.
As long as the stock price holds, Trump will eventually be able to cash out, likely pulverizing his company’s market cap in the process. And when that happens—or when Trump loses in November—investors will come to see Trump Media as the meme stock it is, leaving Trump’s most faithful followers holding a very malodorous bag.
(This is more than just speculation. Trump’s first public company, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, lost more than $1 billion, went bankrupt, and cleaned out retail investors, though Trump himself skated away with more than $44 million.)
Then there are the goofy NFTs, garish golden sneakers, blasphemous Bibles, and endless streams of worthless tchotchkes that Trump continually hawks like a carnival barker with a $2,000-a-day funnel cake habit.
Meanwhile, Trump is also dipping his mitts into tills that were never meant for his dainty digits.
The Associated Press, March 22:
Donald Trump’s new joint fundraising agreement with the Republican National Committee directs donations to his campaign and a political action committee that pays the former president’s legal bills before the RNC gets a cut, according to a fundraising invitation obtained by The Associated Press.
The unorthodox diversion of funds to the Save America PAC makes it more likely that Republican donors could see their money go to Trump’s lawyers, who have received at least $76 million over the last two years to defend him against four felony indictments and multiple civil cases. Some Republicans are already troubled that Trump’s takeover of the RNC could shortchange the cash-strapped party.
In other words, he’s essentially saying “screw you” to the broader MAGA movement—and the Republican Party as a whole, which has blithely sold its soul for this pouch of tragic beans—in order to stay out of jail, or to keep from surrendering the tens of millions he’s been ordered to pay as a result of the civil suits he keeps losing. And yet the MAGA minions keep lining up like Oliver Twist for more thin gruel.
By the way, to put some perspective on how labyrinthine Trump’s legal troubles actually are, a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation provides an estimate for just how many lawyers—or lawyer equivalents—might be working on Trump’s myriad cases, based on that $90,000-a-day figure.
Even if you assume Trump’s lawyers are commanding top dollar—which would be $2,465 per hour, based on the numbers in this blog post—that’s 36 attorney hours each and every day. Or the equivalent of one and a half top-flight attorneys working 24-hour shifts to keep Trump’s life from instantly falling apart.
That is one expensive presidential candidate—and one seriously hefty tithe for a cult that returns little more than tacit permission to be deplorable racists. MAGAs could spend about one-tenth as much to go mini-golfing with David Duke and get the same warm and fuzzy feelings. But then they wouldn’t have those super cool golden sneakers to fall back on, now would they?
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