President Donald Trump’s first 12 days in office have been marked by mass protests, outrage over his executive actions, head-butting with the press over “alternative facts,” reports of internal chaos at a number of federal agencies, and civil wars amongst his top advisors. That’s not to mention the half-dozen brewing constitutional crises already at the doorstep of the White House.
All of this must weigh on the newly inducted 70-year-old president, whose days used to consist of a steady diet of cable news, consumed in the comfort of his Fifth Avenue triplex, and overseeing a family business he could run with his eyes closed. Most days, he didn’t even have to leave Trump Tower. In fact, he preferred not to.
So it would be no surprise if the president, under fire so early on, would want an out. It’s been reported that Trump is already looking to escape D.C. for a weekend (before he was sworn in, Trump reportedly asked advisers how often he could return to New York).
And yet, it appears, perhaps surprisingly, that President Trump is planning for a longer future at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. On the same day that Trump took the oath of office, he submitted a letter to the F.E.C. stating that while he was not formally announcing a re-election campaign, he noted that he met the legal qualifications for doing so. A few days earlier, he came up with his 2020 campaign slogan—Keep America Great!—and called for a lawyer to trademark it in the middle of an interview with The Washington Post.
A month after he won the election, Trump’s committees continued to spend as if he’s still campaigning, too. According to a Politico analysis of documents filed with the Federal Election Commission on Tuesday night, Trump’s three committees collected $11 million in December, ending 2016 with $16 million in the bank. In total, the campaign spent $32 million in December in order to build its database, collect data, and pay for branding and key staff members. The committees, for example, laid out $728,000 on hats, likely for his “Make America Great Again” baseball caps, and another $2.4 million on mugs, stickers, T-shirts, and banners, Politico reports. They paid another $511,000 to Giles-Parscale, the Texas-based digital and online advertising operation run by Brad Parscale, who has been credited with propelling the campaign on a path to victory, bringing the total amount he has collected from Trumplandia to $88 million.
Parscale isn’t the only one made rich by Team Trump. The Mercer family, headed by a father-daughter billionaire duo who bundle for Republicans and have been among Trump’s biggest and most influential donors, have also done well by the campaign. Their data firm, Cambridge Analytica, has been paid $5.9 million since Trump launched his bid for the White House, raking in $312,500 in December, the month after the election, according to Politico.
Trump, too, has gotten richer from his campaign. Since the election, Trump’s campaign committees paid Trump’s companies more than $200,000, Politico reported, with $131,000 of that going to rent campaign offices in Trump Tower, which remain open in order to continue to raise money and keep a crew of campaign staffers on hand.
DROP
President Trump took heat in his first few days in office for governing as if he were still running a campaign. The night before his inauguration, at a candlelight dinner with major donors and Republican leadership at Union Station, Trump didn’t speak about unity, about what makes this nation great, or about his vision for the future. Instead, he prattled on about how he pulled the last one off, how the polls were wrong, and how he flipped states no one even considered he’d be able to take. His first speech as president wasn’t any more unifying, with its apocalyptic imagery and talk of “carnage.” It was, many agreed, a continuation of his polarizing campaign addressed to his base—not one that would bring together Americans, the majority of whom did not cast their vote for him. Throughout the rest of his first weekend in office, he was preoccupied with the perception of his inauguration crowd size, a fixation he held on the campaign trail, too.
All of this might have seemed like an odd focus for the president, if it wasn’t clear that he is already starting the wheels in motion for his next campaign. That is, after all, the environment in which Trump best thrives: why he continued to hold rallies across the country after he won and still slams his critics on Twitter as if he has something to prove.
In another administration, it would be considered untoward for a president to continue rewarding his top donors and enriching his own companies after taking the oath of office. But these are minor footnotes next to the massive conflicts of interest presented by Trump’s refusal to divest from his business, which will continue to make deals in the U.S. throughout his presidency and is already cashing in on the power he now holds. The White House, after all, is another business opportunity for Trump, an easy way to add a few zeroes to his net worth (the scope of which we do not know, since he also refuses to release his tax returns). It’s no wonder, then, why he’d want another four years in office. Even without a salary, the money is just too good.
