What Trump’s money troubles really tell us
More incredible news for the Donald Trump juggernaut!
After a 10-day stretch in which Trump found himself rebuked by Republican leaders,plummeting in polls and firing his much-maligned campaign manager, news broke that, according to public filings, his campaign now had about $1.3 million in the bank.
This is awesome if you’re running for a House seat in, say, Maine. It’s slightly less awesome if you’re running for president.
How much less awesome? About 40 times less than what Hillary Clinton has at her disposal — not counting outside groups that have been revving up on her behalf for at least a year. So, yeah, a lot less awesome.
This really is something, considering that all through the primaries Trump bragged about how he was so rich you wouldn’t believe and how he was the only guy on stage who didn’t need to ask for money.
I’ll tell you what it looks like when a seriously rich guy gets serious about winning. When Michael Bloomberg won a third term as New York’s mayor in 2009, he spent about $102 million, or $183 per vote. At that rate, had Bloomberg decided to seek the presidency as an independent, he would have had to spend about $12 billion.
And you know what? He would have, too. Because Bloomberg is not a man who plays around. He has cash and uses it.
But if Bloomberg is the John D. Rockefeller of modern politics, then Trump is its P.T. Barnum — a master of spectacle and illusion. His billions are tied up, spread around, whatever other euphemisms for “not real” you want to employ.
This, I’m guessing, is why he doesn’t want you to see his tax returns. Trump would be happy to shout from the top of Trump Tower that he hasn’t paid a dime in taxes — that fits his narrative of being smarter than everyone else and knowing the flaws in the system that need fixing.
What he’s less enthused to have you know, perhaps, is that he really hasn’t earned much, either. His vast wealth exists on paper, his lifestyle sustained by credit. Kind of like the government.
Let’s leave all that aside for now, though, and focus on the more complicated question of whether Trump’s money problems really matter all that much, and why.
I’ve long argued that money is a vastly overrated resource in presidential politics, generally. There’s certainly a threshold a candidate has to cross in order to be competitive, and safe to say it’s higher than $1.3 million. But whatever that threshold is — let’s say it’s $300 million — the return on every dollar you raise after that is probably marginal, compared with other factors in a campaign.
Just look at what happened in the primaries. Bernie Sanders raised more than $200 million and essentially matched Hillary Clinton in spending, and if you’re going strictly by votes cast in primary states, he got crushed anyway.
Meanwhile, while Trump relied largely on the generosity of cable networks, Jeb Bush’s L.A.-based super-PAC blew through more than $100 million and impressed pretty much no one. That had to make the producers of “Tomorrowland” feel better.
Sure, Trump needs to narrow his fundraising gap with Clinton. But money just isn’t as big or as predictable a part of the equation as we make it out to be — and by “we” I mean the journalists who cover campaigns as if they belonged on ESPN and the professionals who profit from campaign payrolls.
That said, if we step back from the fundraising minutiae for a moment, we can derive at least three pretty relevant insights on the state of Trump’s candidacy from his political penury. And none of them is likely to lift Republican insiders out of their growing despondency.
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