Former president Donald Trump’s political committees have lined his coffers with almost $1m obtained from donors over the last two years, even as he failed to put much of the receipts towards electing Republicans in last year’s midterm elections.
According to Federal Election Commission filings reviewed by The Independent, Mr Trump’s self-dealing has brought $905,570 in funds from his Save America Political Action Committee and his nascent 2024 presidential campaign committee into his family’s businesses’ pockets from 20 January 2021 — the day Mr Trump left office — to the end of 2022.
Some of the expenditures by his presidential campaign are relatively small, such as a pair of $48 charges at Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach social club he owns and uses as his primary residence.
Others were larger, such as the $94,462 spent by his Save America PAC at his Central Park West hotel in December 2021.
Mr Trump launched Save America in late 2020, when he was pushing to overturn the results of the election he’d lost to Joe Biden and remain in office against the wishes of American voters.
Despite taking in hundreds of millions of dollars from his supporters, Mr Trump did not use the committee’s funds to bolster Republican candidates until members of his own party began to point out that he wasn’t doing much to fund campaigns as the midterms approached.
He later transferred much of those funds to a separate committee that put $15m into a roster of election denying candidates who went on to lose their respective contests, and directly transferred approximately $5,000 to 152 GOP candidates last cycle.
But his committee’s largest expenditure has been legal fees, with $27.3m going to law firms handling the myriad investigations into his conduct.
