Before and after becoming the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump has boasted repeatedly about paying for his campaign himself and eschewing traditional finance models of presidential campaigns.
“I don’t need anybody’s money,” Trump said in his June 2015 announcement, a sentiment repeated on the campaign trail many times over the past year, most recently on Saturday at a rally in Las Vegas.
But while Trump said he didn’t need anyone’s money, the billionaire businessman hasn’t turned it away either.
According to an analysis of the most recent finance reports by Crowdpac, a Silicon Valley-based political data site, Trump accepted roughly $14 million in campaign contributions through the end of April. Those donations came from 8,200 individual donors.
Trump’s campaign received $57.7 million through the end of April, in the most recent Federal Election Commission filing period. Of that total, nearly three-quarters of those funds came from loans that Trump has made to his campaign. The rest came from donors, according to the FEC.
Crowdpac’s analysis found that of the more than 8,000 donors that gave to his campaign through April, 28% came from women, compared with 44% for all presidential candidates.
Roughly 3% of Trump’s donors are liberal, according to Crowdpac’s ideological scoring. And one-third of Trump’s donors came from three of the nation’s most populous states, according to Crowdpac: California, Florida and Texas.
Thirty percent of Trump’s donors indicated that they were retired, according to Crowdpac. And just two donors identified themselves as employees of Trump, including the building manager of Trump Tower.
While Trump largely self-funded his primary campaign, he is now primarily raising money for a joint fundraising committee in agreement with the Republican National Committee. Trump said during a speech in Las Vegas that he has raised $12 million to $13 million for the Republican Party in the last few days.
“Right now I’m raising a lot of money for the Republican Party,” Trump said Saturday at a rally in Phoenix. “But we have to have help. Life is like a two-way street.”
Trump said Saturday that if the RNC didn’t want to boost his campaign financially, he would fund it himself.
“For me, that’s the easy way,” he said.