President Donald Trump’s army of lawyers may be the largest of any Oval Office occupant in history. Aside from the attorneys who work for the office of the president, he has retained a veritable phalanx of personal attorneys over the years to represent him in court. That kind of legal firepower doesn’t come cheap. But according to recent Federal Election Commission filings, the funding stream Trump has been using to pay out millions to law firms is running very, very low on cash.
Both PACs are in a much worse financial state now that Trump isn’t actively running for president.
Trump spent much of his time between presidential terms fending off a string of civil and criminal cases. Despite the mounting threats, he remained loath to spend out of his own deep pockets to cover the equally mounting legal fees. Instead, Trump routed money from the donations pouring into his political action committees, primarily Save America PAC. Some of the money diverted toward legal fees also came from Make America Great Again PAC, the reskinned shell of his 2020 re-election campaign.
Between the two committees, Trump funneled $50 million toward his legal fees over the course of 2023 alone. It was a massive expenditure in an off year, especially with the 2024 presidential race looming. The New York Times reported in July 2023 that Save America was facing “dwindling cash reserves,” when it only had $4 million in its coffers after starting 2022 with $105 million.
Both PACs are in a much worse financial state now that Trump isn’t actively running for president. Based on its quarterly filing with the FEC, Save America has $1.19 million in cash on hand. That would be a tidy sum for you or me, but Save America also owes a total of $1.6 million, all of which is meant to cover previous “legal consulting” or “reimbursement for legal fees and expenses.” Those debts are what is left after the committee already spent almost $2.3 million covering those budget items so far this year.
Save America also transferred an additional $1.6 million to Make America Great Again PAC since January. Despite that, according to its latest FEC filing, MAGA PAC only has $28,087 in cash on hand at the end of the first quarter, versus $763,000 in debts. Much as with Save America, $1.3 million of the committee’s money likewise went to paying out legal fees in the last quarter.
Save America owes the lion’s share of its debt to two firms: NechelesLaw LLP and Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. The former’s lead partner, Susan Necheles, represented Trump in the 2024 New York “hush money” case that led to Trump being convicted on 34 counts of fraud. The latter firm has taken up Trump’s appeal of that hush money case and the massive $350 million civil judgement against him and his company, The Trump Organization. Meanwhile, MAGA PAC owes $318,000 to Colorado firm Campbell Killin Brittan & Ray LLC, which represented the 2024 campaign in a defamation suit, and another $183,000 to Virginia’s Binnall Law Group, which served as counsel to Trump on issues regarding the Jan. 6 insurrection.
On one level, though, exactly which PAC’s bank account these legal debts are eventually pulled from is beside the point.
There is a chance that Trump’s 2024 campaign vehicle — which has been converted into a PAC called Never Surrender — could begin filling in the gaps from the other PACs. Never Surrender has more than $50 million in the bank, according to its latest FEC filing, which is nothing to sneeze at. It has already been paying The Dhillon Law Group, the firm owned by Justice Department official Harmeet Dhillon, which Trump retained to block an attempt in 2023 to remove him from the ballot in Colorado.
On one level, however, exactly which PAC’s bank account these legal debts are eventually pulled from is beside the point. It is only thanks to a gaping hole in campaign finance law, such as it is, that not a single penny of those payments will come from the president directly. Instead, those debts will all likely be covered courtesy of his loyal donors, many of whom were never told exactly where their contributions would be going.
It’s in some ways confounding that more MAGA voters don’t feel like victims of a bait-and-switch, especially considering the less than scrupulous tactics his campaigns have employed in the past. But Trump has managed to convince his devotees that his personal life and political life are so intermingled that political attacks on him are attacks on them as well. It follows then that even as the money they’ve sent him in response has gone toward supporting Trump’s lawlessness, his criminality and his avaricious quest to siphon ever more money into his own pockets, the response has been to shrug, pull out their wallets and add more dollars to the collection basket.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.