WASHINGTON -- After entering June with just $3.1 million in his campaign bank account, Donald Trump helped raise $51 million for his campaign and the Republican Party in June, he announced Wednesday.
This was the first full month that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee spent raising money from donors after self-funding his primary campaign. Trump began courting the party’s wealthy elite in the final week of May, soliciting donations for the Trump Victory and the Trump Make America Great Again joint fundraising committees. Those two committees collect contributions for the Trump campaign and the RNC. The Trump Victory committee also solicits money for a handful of state party committees.
Trump raised $26 million online and through direct mail and an additional $25 million at high dollar events. The candidate also contributed an additional $3.8 million of his own money to the campaign, a Trump press release stated.
The division of funds between the Trump campaign and the RNC is unknown at this time.
These totals are short of the $68.5 million that Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, raised for her campaign and the Democratic Party in June. Clinton also started June with a massive cash on hand lead of $42 million.
That vast disparity has allowed the Clinton campaign to fund a staff of hundreds of organizers in key swing states and run over 20,000 television advertisements. Trump, meanwhile, has only just begun to cobble together an outreach and organizing program and has run exactly zero ads since the end of the primary campaign.
After reporting a paltry cash on hand total entering June, Trump issued a statement declaring that his campaign's fundraising was "incredible" and that he continues “to see a tremendous outpouring of support for Mr. Trump and money to the Republican Party.”
The campaign did not report how much cash it had on hand at the end of June.
Trump will require an unprecedented surge in fundraising to come close to catching up with the well-funded and well-oiled Clinton machine in the coming months. His June haul should be a good start, but it vastly trails the amount raked in by 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney after he secured the nomination.
June was also Romney's first full month as the presumptive Republican nominee. He raised $68.3 million for the Romney Victory committee -- which shared money with his campaign, the RNC and four state parties -- and an additional $24.3 million exclusively for his campaign. On top of that, the RNC raised $12.7 million independent of Romney’s fundraising efforts. That means Romney and the committees he raised money for raked in $105.5 million in June 2012 alone -- more than double what Trump has raised in his first month on a general election campaign.
Editor's note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims -- 1.6 billion members of an entire religion -- from entering the U.S.
