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President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump
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President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party raised more than $85 million in May, his campaign said Thursday, lagging behind rival former President Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee for the second month in a row.
Meanwhile, Trump’s political ambitions got a major boost in May when a super PAC supporting his campaign received a $50 million injection from Timothy Mellon, the reclusive billionaire banking heir who has emerged as one of the single largest donors in this year’s presidential election.
The Biden campaign’s May haul was the second-largest grassroots fundraising haul for the president this term, the campaign said, but it was far short of the staggering $141 million that Trump and his political campaign said they had raised last month, fueled by tens of millions of dollars raised in the days following his May 30 conviction in New York for falsifying business records.
The Biden campaign said Thursday that his committees had a massive $212 million in cash at the end of June. The Trump campaign has not yet disclosed the cash holdings of all its committees.
The campaigns aren’t required to do so until next month, but documents filed with the Federal Election Commission late Thursday showed that Trump’s main committee had more than $116.5 million in cash reserves as of May 31, while Biden’s main campaign account had $91.6 million, underscoring how Trump’s fundraising success in recent months has eroded the financial advantage Biden held for much of the campaign.
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The Biden campaign said the money was helping it build its campaign infrastructure and touted how it had worked with Democrats to hire more than 1,000 staffers in battleground states.
“Our strong and consistent fundraising program grew by millions in May, a clear sign of strong and growing enthusiasm for the President and Vice President month after month,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement. “The funds we continue to raise are critical and help us build an operation invested in reaching and winning over the voters who will decide the election.”
The total released by the Biden campaign on Thursday did not include a recent round of fundraising by the president, who raised more than $30 million last weekend, a Democratic record, at an event featuring former President Barack Obama and Hollywood luminaries including George Clooney and Julia Roberts.
The Trump campaign also touted nearly $20 million in donations from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Thursday to help him with his reelection. The billionaire, who faced off against Biden in the 2020 Democratic primary, donated $929,600, the largest amount donated, to the Biden Victory Fund, a joint fundraising arm of the Democratic Committee, campaign officials said. Bloomberg also donated $19 million to FF PAC, the main super PAC fighting Biden’s reelection campaign, according to a filing the group made with federal regulators on Thursday.
Bloomberg’s donation was first reported by The Washington Post.
Meanwhile, the $50 million that Mellon donated last month to the Trump-aligned super PAC MAGA Inc. made up the majority of the $68.8 million the group reported raising in May, according to new filings. The donation, recorded the day after Trump was convicted in New York, will help fuel a $100 million advertising offensive the super PAC is planning for the summer.
Mellon has donated a total of $100 million to super PACs linked to presidential candidates, making him one of the richest funders in the 2024 presidential campaign. As of last month, the Wyoming-based investor had given $25 million each to a super PAC supporting Trump and another supporting the independent campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is unlikely to win the election.
American Values 2024, a super PAC affiliated with Kennedy, did not report further donations from Mellon in its May financial filing, but Democrats have highlighted Mellon’s financial support to both men as part of an effort to portray Kennedy, the scion of a prominent Democratic family, as a Republican-backed obstructionist candidate.
Thursday’s filing also revealed that legal costs continue to drain Trump’s campaign coffers as his criminal trial in New York nears its end.
More than $3.6 million, or 85 percent of the money spent by Trump’s leadership PAC, Save America, which has become the campaign’s main vehicle for paying legal fees, went toward legal expenses last month. The law firm of Todd Blanche, Trump’s lead lawyer in the criminal trial, received about half that amount, $1.8 million. The PAC also had unpaid legal fees totaling $861,000 through June.
Save America has spent more than $83 million on legal fees since Trump left office.
This story has been updated with additional information.
CNN’s Arlette Saenz contributed to this report.
