Eye-popping haul amid trials has Team Trump closing fundraising gap with Biden
Former President Trump's campaign and the Republican National Committee (RNC) are showcasing that they hauled in over $76 million last month, as the presumptive GOP nominee works to reduce his fundraising deficit to President Biden in their 2024 election rematch.
The announcement came as Trump this weekend headlines the RNC's spring donor retreat, which is being held in Palm Beach, Florida.
The haul by Trump and the RNC is up from $65.6 million in March. But Biden and the Democratic National Committee combined raked in roughly $90 million in March. And according to campaign disclosures, the president had more than twice as much money in his campaign coffers as the Republican challenger and predecessor in the White House as of the beginning of April.
But Trump and the RNC's fundraising has soared since the former president clinched the 2024 GOP nomination in March, and his top political advisers repeatedly insist they'll have enough campaign cash to compete with Biden.
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"President Donald J. Trump is not only winning across every battleground state, but we are raising the resources necessary to deliver a victory in November," Trump campaign senior advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles said in a statement Saturday that announced the April haul.
"With half of funds raised coming from small dollar donors, it is clear that our base is energized. The Republican Party is united, and voters nationwide are ready to FIRE Joe Biden and elect President Donald J. Trump," they added.
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"Our team will continue working every day to exceed expectations, raise the funds we need, and build an unmatched party infrastructure to prove that President Trump’s momentum is unstoppable," RNC chair Michael Whatley and co-chair Lara Trump added in the statement.
Whatley, the former North Carolina GOP chair, and Lara Trump, the former president's daughter-in-law, were installed as the new RNC leadership by Trump in early March as he effectively took over control of the party after clinching the nomination.
The fundraising figures were first revealed earlier on Saturday as Trump campaign officials gave a one-hour presentation to donors at the closed-door retreat, Republican sources confirmed to Fox News. The weekend confab is being held at the Four Seasons oceanfront resort in Palm Beach and at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club, which is located a few miles north.
During the presentation, which was first reported Saturday by the New York Times, Trump campaign officials emphasized that the former president is ahead in the key battleground states of Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, and competitive in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Biden narrowly carried all six of those states in 2020 to defeat Trump and win the White House.
Trump's advisers also said they aimed to expand the map in Minnesota and Virginia, where they said their polling shows Trump competitive in states Biden comfortably won four years ago.
The RNC spring retreat provided a brief break for Trump from his criminal trial in New York City. The former president is being tried on nearly three-dozen state felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records in relation to hush-money payments during the 2016 election he made to Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about his alleged affair with the adult film actress.
Trump has repeatedly denied falsifying business records as well as the alleged sexual encounter with Daniels.