It's been a whirlwind few days for Donald Trump, who this week became the first former president of the United States to be tried on criminal charges. Yet the hush money trial is also a lucrative fundraising opportunity for his presidential campaign, which blasted his supporters this week with sensational pleas for money, citing the trial.
And it seems to have worked: NBC News reported on Friday that Trump’s campaign raised $1.6 million in small-dollar donations on the first day of his trial alone. The campaign has raised that much online on only three other days so far this year, all near the end of March, according to filings from WinRed, the Trump campaign’s online donation platform.
It’s no surprise that Trump’s team saw a golden opportunity to use the criminal trial as a hook for fundraising. The campaign has reliably seen an uptick in small-dollar donations when new developments arise in his various legal cases. In the week after he was indicted in the hush money case, for example, his campaign raised more than $13 million after sending out dozens of fundraising appeals that referred to the criminal charges, Reuters reported.
And Trump desperately needs the money. The New York Times reported that since leaving the White House, Trump has spent more than $100 million on legal-related bills in the civil and criminal cases against him — most of which came from donations. In recent months, he has also had to post multimillion-dollar bonds while he appeals the massive civil judgments against him.
Meanwhile, the former president has continued to play into the narrative that he is a victim of a “weaponized” criminal justice system. In posts on Truth Social this week, he misrepresented the jury selection process and falsely claimed that Judge Juan Merchan would not allow him to attend his son Barron Trump’s graduation.