Trump Got $10,890 From Donors In February. Tales From the FEC

This is so funny. None other than Dan Rather has an opinion about Donald Trump being too broke to run for office. The veteran journalist has been reading the Federal Election Commission reports and concluding the obvious and that is that Trump’s campaign is in trouble, plenty.

Here’s the real story of what’s going on. Trump is burning through cash and paying his mounting legal bills with money from donors. Federal Election Commission filings reveal just how bad it is for Team Trump.

In February, Trump’s Save America PAC took in $5 million, most of which was a reimbursement from his campaign fund. Only $10,890 came from actual donors. This is a real problem. Trump has 62% fewer small donors now than he did during the last election cycle. Big donors are gun-shy, too, because they are worried he will spend their money on legal fees. And they should be: The PAC used more than $5 million in February to pay Trump’s battalion of lawyers fighting cases all over the country. Is that legal? A former FEC counsel told Forbes the practice is “highly questionable.”

One of those lawyers is Alina Habba. She defended Trump in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, with a courtroom performance some legal experts called “embarrassing.” Trump lost, twice, and now owes Carroll almost $90 million. Trump has paid Habba more than $1.5 million over the past year for her work.

That’s a pretty hefty year’s salary for any lawyer, but especially for a lawyer of limited skills who never tried a case before — or so we were told when she botched the E. Jean Carroll trial and embarrassed herself by not knowing basic trial procedure. But then in all fairness, Habba was hired to be eye candy and do political theater, not for an impressive track record as a litigator.

And yes, Trump did seemingly get some good news today with the Truth Social merger, but it has a big “but” attached to it: “He can’t sell his stock or use it as collateral for six months. The company’s board could vote to waive that restriction, but dumping a lot of the stock quickly will cause it to lose value,” Rather says. So maybe he can get his lawyers to take an IOU until he’s able to actually get Truth Social rolling on the stock market and let’s face it, that may never happen. Not when it dropped over 11 points on the stock exchange this very morning when news of the merger went public. But in any event, if the big money comes from Truth Social, it will not be in time to pay the $454M due on Monday.

Here’s the part you’ll love.

While Trump’s campaign is spending millions of fundraising dollars on legal fees, President Biden is raising more and spending it on new staff, travel to battleground states, and TV ads in those key states. Since Super Tuesday Biden has been to every swing state but one. During the same period, The New York Times reports Trump has been holed up at Mar-a-Lago wining and dining potential donors. Long gone are the days of bragging; now he’s begging. The Times says Trump is “turning Mar-a-Lago into a staging ground for billionaires and others with their own agendas.”

As you know, Joe Biden raised $10M the day after his stellar SOTU alone. He hit that one out of the park. And his war chest had $155M on hand. So the president has already been to Arizona, which Trump couldn’t afford to do last week, when he went to Ohio. But Trump, two weeks into the general election, “is hiding at his country club and is letting convicts and conspiracy theorists take over his campaign,” in the words of a Biden aide. “That is not a winning strategy.”

Dan Rather bottom lines it: “If Trump is spending most of his time in courtrooms rather than on rally stages, and if his campaign coffers continue to be barren, his ability to reach those needed swing voters will be seriously curtailed.”

In all truth, I don’t know if Trump can persuade anybody. He’s got his die hard cultists, that much we know. He’s gone out of his way to alienate the voters who voted for Haley, DeSantis, Christie, anybody but him. We also know that. As much of a circus as this has been and as long as it’s gone on, I honestly don’t know if any of the laws of political physics apply. But definitely as the campaign ramps up, if Trump can’t show up anywhere, can’t afford any ads, and is spending all his time in court and publicly going broke, I don’t see how that could positively affect anybody who is thinking of casting a vote for the man.

Trump is a washed up act and I think the next seven months will prove that conclusively. And as always in his life, nobody is able to prove what a complete loser Trump is better than Trump himself. Team Biden would do well to just take the ad fodder he gives them, knit it all together, and make a perfect spectacle of it. Trump is one those rare buffoons, where everything he does is spectacle.