Trump’s colossal legal fees are draining his campaign at the worst time

If President Joe Biden has any advantage going into the 2024 presidential election, it’s that former President Donald Trump’s legal fees and primary challenges are a significant drain on the Trump campaign’s finances. 

Indeed, with money playing an increasingly prominent role in political campaigns, particularly presidential contests, both Trump and Biden are facing a very similar problem, albeit for different reasons, and to varying degrees. While both are raising less money than past candidates, and both are spending considerable sums, only Trump has to split his spending between politics and rapidly mounting legal costs. 

Despite worrisome poll numbers in a head-to-head matchup with Trump — Biden trails 44 percent to 46 percent according to the RealClearPolitics average — and just 40 percent of Americans approving of Biden’s job performance, by the end of January, Biden and his various campaign arms have accumulated $130 million in cash, raising $42 million over the last month alone, according to Federal Election Commission filings.  

Moreover, 97 percent of all of Biden’s donations are coming from donors giving less than $200, and in January alone, more than 420,000 individual donors made contributions, underscoring the small-money, grassroots support Biden can count on. 

To be sure, Biden’s numbers are staggering compared to the Trump campaign, previously considered a fundraising behemoth after raising $774 million in the 2020 cycle. Today however, FEC filings show that Trump has about $30.5 million cash on hand and raised a dismal, if not extremely concerning, $13.8 million over the last month.  

Worse, Trump’s campaign spent nearly $3 million more than it raised in January, taking in just under $9 million, but spending more than $11 million, as they continue spending on the Republican primary and his mounting legal fees. 

Notably, over the last two months, the Trump campaign’s biggest expense was $4.7 million in Iowa and New Hampshire fending off Nikki Haley’s primary challenge. Not far behind, a Trump-connected PAC doled out $2.9 million to pay for the former president’s legal fees just in January alone. 

These rising costs come at the same time Trump’s personal fortune is set to take a massive hit. In recent weeks, he lost two civil trials for fraud and defamation, amounting to $438 million in penalties that, due to campaign finance laws, he cannot use campaign funds to pay.  

Somewhat ironically, Nikki Haley has been a blessing to Democrats as she maintains her nagging primary challenge. Haley has also outraised Trump of late. As Bloomberg reports, her Stand for America Fund Inc. super PAC raised $50.1 million in the last six months of 2023, $5 million more than the super PAC supporting the former president. 

Why, then, is Biden not running away with this race? While Biden is not inundated with the legal fees plaguing Trump’s campaign, his spending on campaign ads reflects a candidate floundering to find a message that works. 

Over the past six months, Biden’s campaign apparatus has burned more than $20 million on advertising in swing states, seemingly to no avail, at least in terms of his polling numbers. 

Trump seems to be maintaining, if not expanding, his lead in critical swing states. The former president is leading Biden in Nevada (49-40 percent), Georgia (49-42 percent), Arizona (47-42 percent) and Michigan (47-42 percent), with Wisconsin and Pennsylvania being virtually tied, per the RealClearPolitics averages in those states. 

Further, in the wake of special counsel Robert Hur’s report which called into question Biden’s mental fitness, the Biden campaign’s spending seems to have been rendered useless as nearly 8 in 10 (78 percent) registered voters describe Biden as “too old” in the most recent Marquette University Law poll. 

Ignoring the impact of money on voter’s preferences, Biden’s fundraising strategy, from a purely cash perspective, seems to be working, at least for now. But Trump’s fundraising prowess should not be underestimated. In the last month of the 2020 campaign, Trump outraised Biden by $71 million and raised $91.5 million from grassroots donors alone during that same period. 

The good news for Biden is that Trump will be spending tens of millions of dollars on legal fees that show no sign of slowing down in 2024. His personal wealth has and will continue to be under substantial pressure due to the Carroll defamation ruling, the New York City civil fraud fine, not to mention Trump’s criminal trials, such as those in Georgia and Washington, D.C.  

Put another way, as November approaches, Trump is likely to feel the financial impact of trying to run a presidential campaign while diverting much-needed resources towards defending himself from more than 90 felony charges. 

And, while his supporters are clearly enthusiastic and committed, it remains to be seen how much financial endurance his most loyal donors have left, or if big-money donors will come back into the fold once the GOP primary is officially over.  

To be clear, while money is undoubtedly important, this is not to say Trump should be counted out. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Trump leads in the polls, will stop having to spend against Haley when she inevitably drops out and is never short of out-of-the-box ways to raise considerable sums of money, even launching a line of $399 branded sneakers. 

And yet, there are legitimate questions of whether Trump’s strategy of using campaign funds to cover consistently increasing legal costs is sustainable through November.

If not, and Trump has to scale back his advertising and campaign plans, just as Biden and Democrats are throwing everything they have at him and into get-out-the-vote efforts, which could provide critical support for Biden in a race this tight — it is fair to wonder if that will hurt Trump with swing or undecided voters. If the race is as close as I and others predict, those voters may prove decisive in determining who emerges victorious.

Douglas E. Schoen is a political consultant who served as an adviser to President Clinton and to the 2020 presidential campaign of Michael Bloomberg. His new book is “The End of Democracy? Russia and China on the Rise and America in Retreat.”