Trump campaign tells donors it raised $76M in April
Stay updated on Hawaii and national elections coverageDonald Trump’s campaign advisers told donors during a presentation at a Republican National Committee retreat Saturday that Trump’s campaign and the party were projected to raise $76.2 million in April, according to two people who attended the briefing.
Trump’s three top advisers — Susie Wiles, Chris LaCivita and Tony Fabrizio — briefed donors, presented a slideshow and took questions afterward, the attendees said. The attendees were not authorized to speak publicly about the event, which was a closed-door briefing and gathering for party donors.
Trump’s advisers presented a bullish case for the candidate that included the possibility of expanding the electoral map to include the Democratic-leaning states of Minnesota and Virginia. They also noted that Trump has remained mostly ahead in polls even while being outspent by President Joe Biden, just as the former president was outspent in the primary by his rivals.
The Federal Election Commission will not receive fundraising reports until later this month, meaning the numbers can’t be verified until then. In March, Trump and his allied groups reported raising $65.6 million — a significant amount, but still well below what Biden and his affiliated outside groups have raised.
The donor event comes at a highly unusual juncture in the 2024 campaign. Trump is both the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee and also spending four days a week in a New York courtroom in a criminal trial related to falsified business records intended to conceal hush-money payments made to a porn actor in the 2016 campaign.
Trump was scheduled to speak to donors Saturday. A spokesperson for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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The slideshow presentation included three different Electoral College maps, the attendees said. The first was dismissed as “the media’s version,” which included seven swing states: Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina across the Southwest and the Sun Belt, plus Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in the industrial north.
A second slide described “the actual current reality” as only having three swing states: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
And a third slide described an “expanded reality” in which both Minnesota and Virginia would be in play for Trump — an ambitious view of states not widely seen as among the most competitive, but in which the Trump team insists the former president has gained ground.
Campaign officials also outlined how Trump would be spending two upcoming Wednesdays — the lone days when his criminal trial is not scheduled to be in session — with fundraising events in Ohio and Kentucky on May 15 and a trip to Texas on May 22.
Trump’s advisers also described some of their strategy for the general election in the presentation, including reaching 2016 levels of support with white voters and expanding support among Black and Latino voters, particularly among urban men.
The campaign strategists also outlined a plan to prevent the kinds of losses that occurred in 2022 that have been linked to the issue of abortion and the backlash from the Supreme Court’s overturning of federal abortion rights before the midterm elections.
Trump has proudly claimed ownership of the end of Roe v. Wade as the president who appointed a conservative supermajority to the highest court in the country. But he has struggled to answer questions about it since, waffling in discussions with advisers about whether to back a national ban, before ultimately saying in a video he posted a few weeks ago that it’s up to states to decide how to handle the issue.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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