Money was supposed to have been one of the great advantages of incumbency for President Trump, much as it was for President Barack Obama in 2012 and George W. Bush in 2004.
After getting outspent in 2016, Trump filed for re-election on the day of his inauguration — earlier than any other modern president — betting that the head start would deliver him a decisive financial advantage this year.
It seemed to have worked.
His rival, Joe Biden, was relatively broke when he emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee this spring, and Trump and the Republican National Committee had a nearly $200 million cash advantage.
Five months later, Trump’s financial supremacy has evaporated.
Of the $1.1 billon his campaign and the party raised from the beginning of 2019 through July, more than $800 million has already been spent.
Now some people inside the campaign are forecasting what was once unthinkable: a cash crunch with less than 60 days until the election.
Trump today denied that his campaign was in dire financial straits but pledged he would contribute “whatever it takes” from his own personal fortune to ensure the success of his reelection effort.
“If I have to, I would,” Trump said of potentially donating to his campaign. “But we’re doing very well. We needed to spend more money up front because of the pandemic and the statements being made by Democrats, which were, again, disinformation.”
Brad Parscale, the former campaign manager, liked to call Trump’s re-election war machine an “unstoppable juggernaut.”
But interviews with more than a dozen current and former campaign aides and Trump allies, and a review of thousands of items in federal campaign filings, show that the president’s campaign and the R.N.C. developed some profligate habits as they burned through hundreds of millions of dollars.
Since Bill Stepien replaced Parscale in July, the campaign has imposed a series of belt-tightening measures that have reshaped initiatives, including hiring practices, travel and the advertising budget.
Most visibly, the Trump campaign slashed its August television spending, mostly abandoning the airwaves during the party conventions.
In the last two weeks of the month, Biden’s campaign spent $35.9 million on television, compared with $4.8 million for Trump, according to Advertising Analytics.
Among the splashiest and perhaps most questionable purchases of the Trump campaign this year was a pair of Super Bowl ads the campaign reserved for $11 million, more than it has spent on TV in some top battleground states.
It was a vanity splurge that allowed Trump to match the billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s buy for the big game.
There was also a cascade of smaller choices that added up: The campaign hired a coterie of highly paid consultants (Trump’s former bodyguard and White House aide has been paid more than $500,000 by the R.N.C. since late 2017); spent $156,000 for planes to pull aerial banners in recent months; and paid nearly $110,000 to Yondr, a company that makes magnetic pouches used to store cellphones during fund-raisers so that donors could not secretly record Trump and leak his remarks.
“If you spend $800 million and you’re 10 points behind, I think you’ve got to answer the question ‘What was the game plan?’” said Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican strategist who runs a small pro-Trump super PAC, and who accused Parscale of spending “like a drunken sailor.”
Biden, meanwhile, has seen his fundraising soar in the final weeks of the 2020 campaign.
Last month, the former vice president and the Democratic National Committee raked in a record $365 million in contributions — doubling Trump’s $165 million record haul from July and also surpassing the $193 million raised by Barack Obama in September 2008.
Trump has yet to report his August fundraising numbers, and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told reporters today that he did not know when that campaign announcement would come.
Nicholas Everhart, a Republican strategist who owns a firm specializing in placing political ads, said the $800 million spent so far shows the “peril of starting a re-election campaign just weeks after winning.”
“A presidential campaign costs a lot of money to run,” Everhart said. “In essence, the campaign has been spending nonstop for almost four years straight.”
One of the reasons Biden was able to wipe away Trump’s early cash edge was that he sharply contained costs with a minimalistic campaign during the pandemic’s worst months.
Trump officials derisively dismissed it as his “basement” strategy, but from that basement Biden fully embraced Zoom fund-raisers, with top donors asked to give as much as $720,000.
These virtual events typically took less than 90 minutes of the candidate’s time, could raise millions of dollars and cost almost nothing.
Trump has almost entirely refused to hold such fund-raisers.
Aides say he doesn’t like them.