Almost all of former President Donald Trump’s time in politics has been spent facing one investigation or legal threat after another. These seemingly endless run-ins with the law aren’t cheap; it costs money to retain lawyers, even when they aren’t of the highest quality. Trump also hates to pay for almost anything out of his own pocket, leading him to turn instead to his campaign’s donors to help foot the bill.
The result is that over the course of 2023, the Trump campaign and affiliated political action committees spent around $50 million on the legal defense of the former president and others in his orbit, The New York Times reported on Tuesday. That is a truly wild amount of spending for a campaign that wasn’t doing much campaigning in the off year. Now that he’s facing both what is likely to be the most expensive presidential campaign season in history and an unprecedented string of criminal trials, the question is whether Trump will be able to cover it all without negatively affecting one or the other.
In his attempt to avoid dipping into his own funds, Trump is drawing primarily on money from his Save America PAC to pay his ever-mounting legal fees. He’s also spending cash from the Make America Great Again PAC, the current incarnation of his 2020 re-election committee. Those accounts were once flush with cash: In the aftermath of the 2020 election, he raised more than $200 million by selling his supporters on the lie that he was going to expose mass fraud. But since then, Trump has been indicted in four criminal cases and faced several major civil suits, leaving those accounts struggling to stay in the black as the cash on hand has dwindled.
The costs Trump faces are only going to go up as the year goes on, along with his ability to afford time off the campaign trail. His New York state civil trials have wrapped, with the E. Jean Carroll defamation verdict costing him $83 million and another judge poised to hand down millions of dollars in…
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