“[P]lease accept this letter as my Form 2 for the 2020 election,” Trump wrote the Federal Election Commission on Jan. 20, 2017.
What’s a “Form 2 .. https://transition.fec.gov/pdf/forms/fecfrm2.pdf ”? Bureaucratic parlance for a politician declaring one’s candidacy. And doing so allowed Trump to legally raise campaign money for an election nearly four years away.
Raise money Trump has. Unlike any president in U.S. history. Starting the first day he took office — something no other president has done.
The result is a permanent presidential campaign in which the free world’s leader at times appears more occupied with running for re-election than running the country:
---------- -- Since his inauguration, Trump has conducted at least 57 political rallies — funded in part by his campaign and not official White House business. All but a half-dozen took place in states he won in 2016, allowing him to bolster his bases of support.
-- During the 35-day partial federal government shutdown triggered by Trump’s desire to fund a wall on the southern border, Trump repeatedly solicited supporters with shutdown-themed fundraising messages. Come-ons included buying a “brick” for $20.20 to send to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and contributing to an “Official Secure the Border Fund” — this wasn’t a government fund, but rather, Trump’s re-election committee. Trump’s website featured “Build the Wall” products when on Friday he declared a national emergency to secure wall funding, and his campaign texted supporters — “We have an INVASION!” — to send money.
-- Trump has expertly and endlessly marketed his political brand, peddling Trump T-shirts and trinkets and MAGA swag, the proceeds from which go directly to Donald J. Trump for President. “They push those products so hard,” said Bentley Hensel, president of political e-commerce firm 1776 Consulting, who estimates 30 percent of the Trump campaign’s contributions during 2017 and 2018 could have come from merchandise sales.
Since the beginning of 2017, Trump’s own campaign committee has raised $67.5 million while seven major pro-Trump super PACs .. https://publicintegrity.org/federal-politics/donald-trump-army-super-pacs-maga-nonprofits .. together have raised nearly $64 million more, according to a Center for Public Integrity .. https://publicintegrity.org/ .. analysis of federal campaign finance disclosures. Trump-aligned “social welfare” nonprofits have collectively generated additional tens of millions of dollars.
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And the Republican National Committee entered the 2020 presidential election cycle with $23.5 million in available funds, which Trump also stands to tap.
No other U.S. president — Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton — marshaled any such operation two years into their respective first terms.
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“President Trump has been a campaign finance innovator from Day 1. He’s really shattered all norms,” said Michael Toner, a former Republican Federal Election Commission chairman who’s now the election law and government ethics director at the Wiley Rein LLP law firm. “I don’t think we’ll ever again see a presidential candidate not raise money during the first two years of a first term anymore.”
But it wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Donald Trump himself said so.
‘I don't need anybody's money'
After Trump descended a golden escalator and announced his first presidential run after decades of abortive attempts to win public office, he declared himself free of the forces that so often bankroll politicians’ aspirations.
“I don’t need anybody’s money. It’s nice. I don’t need anybody’s money. I’m using my own money. I’m not using the lobbyists. I’m not using donors. I don’t care. I’m really rich,” Trump said on June 16, 2015, during the same rambling speech in which he chided President Barack Obama for his golf habits and called Mexican immigrants “rapists.”
Other politicians “will never make America great again,” Trump continued. “They don’t even have a chance. They’re controlled fully — they’re controlled fully by the lobbyists, by the donors, and by the special interests, fully.”
And: “All Presidential candidates should immediately disavow their Super PAC’s. They're not only breaking the spirit of the law but the law itself,” he tweeted in October 2015.
Perhaps Trump just lied.
Perhaps he yielded to the financial pressures of a presidential race in which a showdown with cash-flush Democrat Hillary Clinton loomed.
Either way, Trump’s early shtick — the super PAC bashing, the megadonor shaming, the “dark money” deriding — soon softened.
His generalized disdain for pay-to-play politics also faded as his campaign took off and his poll numbers soared. In mid-2016, Trump attended a pair of events for Make America Great Again PAC, a super PAC created to support his presidential bid. His presidential committee began aggressively soliciting contributions from anyone who’d give it money.
By the time Trump had all but captured the Republican presidential nomination, his reformist rhetoric had effectively ceased. Pro-Trump super PACs and the like, some run by close Trump allies, proliferated. (Today, more than a dozen such groups are actively trumpeting Trump.)
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