Trump has put nearly $1 million in donor money into his own pockets since leaving office

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump hasn’t spent much of the money he’s raised in the past two years fighting his 2020 election defeat or helping Republicans win two Georgia Senate seats or fund a “red wave” in 2022, but he managed to put nearly $1 million of his donor contributions directly into his own cash registers.

From the day he left office until the end of last year, the various political committees of the former president who attempted the coup have spent $905,570 on his properties, according to a HuffPost analysis. new documents filed by the Federal Election Commission.

From the $94,462 Trump’s “PAC leadership” dropped at Trump’s hotel on Manhattan’s Central Park West on Dec. 10, 2021, to the $1,122 his newly reformed presidential campaign spent on his golf course in West Palm Beach on Dec. 12, 2022, to two tabs of $48 the campaign spent at its Mar-a-Lago social club on Nov. 18, 2022, all of which represents a conversion of donor money into revenue at Trump businesses , the benefits going directly to him personally.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a query from HuffPost about this.

However, his tendency to spend large sums on the committees he controls for his own benefit is not new.

During his 2016 campaign, he established his headquarters in his own mixed-use building in Manhattan, turning unleased office space into cash. Then, when he secured the nomination and the source of the money became the Republican National Committee’s fundraising operation rather than his own campaign, Trump quintupled the rent he was charging himself.

The Trump Tower, in fact, has remained the Trump Committee’s biggest spending target over the past two years, receiving a total of $412,958 from the Make America Great Again PAC, his renamed and reconstituted 2020 Campaign Committee, in the form of $37,542 per month. payments for 11 months.

Although the payments were described as “rent” in FEC filings, no political committee work took place there. The practice stopped immediately after HuffPost published an article about it.

Trump’s hotel in New York received $336,218 in Trump committee money, and Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, where Trump also lives during the winter months, received $137,272. That amount includes $68,988 the company received after it became the location for Trump’s 2024 campaign announcement on Nov. 15.

Trump began aggressively raising funds for Save America shortly after losing his 2020 re-election bid. In a deluge of fundraising emails and text messages to his list of some 20 million supporters, he said he would use the money to pursue legal challenges against his losses in states narrowly won by Democrat Joe Biden and help the two Republican senators from Georgia in their runoff elections. In fact, he didn’t spend any of Save America’s money on those two purposes.

Last summer, after fellow Republicans criticized him for collecting such a large proportion of small-dollar donations that could have instead gone to GOP candidates actually on the ballot, Trump transferred much of Save America’s cash hoard to a new super PAC headed by a former assistant. , who ended up spending $15 million on behalf of Republican candidates Trump favored because they were willing to spread his lies about a stolen election.

Most of these candidates ended up losing. And a much larger chunk of that money, $54 million, stays with the super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., which can now use it to boost Trump’s 2024 candidacy — something Save America isn’t. not legally allowed to do.

Trump gave 152 House and Senate candidates $5,000 each for their campaigns, for a total of $760,000. But his spending on candidates was eclipsed by the $27.3 million he paid to attorneys, most of whom appear to be handling his various personal legal issues.

Despite multiple criminal investigations into his coup attempt to stay in power and his refusal to hand over classified documents in defiance of a subpoena, Trump remains the leading contender for the 2024 Republican nomination in many polls. .