She raised more than $140 million for her campaign and the Democratic Party in August—dwarfing President Obama’s haul four years ago.
.. Trump, who collected $82 million for his campaign and the GOP during a strong showing in July, has not released his numbers for August. Clinton has now raised more than $400 million during her presidential run.
.. What may be most significant about Clinton’s total, however, is not the $62 million she raised for her own campaign but the $81 million she took in for the Democratic National Committee and state parties.
Tensions Deepen Between Donald Trump and R.N.C.
The Republican National Committee had high hopes that Donald J. Trump would deliver a compassionate and measured speech about immigration on Wednesday, and prepared to lavish praise on the candidate on the party’s Twitter account.
.. The evening tore a painful new wound in Mr. Trump’s relationship with the Republican National Committee, imperiling his most important remaining political alliance.
Mr. Priebus and his organization have been steadfastly supportive of Mr. Trump, defending him in public and spending millions of dollars to aid him. But the collaboration between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Mr. Priebus’s committee has grown strained over the last month
.. There is no prospect of a full public breach between the Trump campaign and the R.N.C. because both sides rely on a joint fund-raising arrangement crucial to their election efforts.
.. Mr. Trump, who has struggled to raise money, is dependent on his party’s national committee to perform many of the basic functions of a presidential campaign.
.. Within Mr. Trump’s circle, there is impatience with what advisers view as a cautious and conventional party bureaucracy, ill-equipped to accommodate Mr. Trump’s improvisational style
.. power is so divided among strategists and members of the Trump family that the process of making even simple decisions is laborious and unpredictable.
.. Mr. Priebus, who has a warm relationship with Mr. Trump and speaks with him daily
.. Throughout the campaign, Mr. Priebus and his committee have been broadly deferential to Mr. Trump, declining to criticize many of his most provocative remarks and quickly designating him as the party’s presumptive nominee in May. For Mr. Trump, Mr. Priebus has appeared to be a patient and accommodating partner, eager to promote his campaign and willing to rebuke Republicans who have declined to support him.
.. In a tone that several witnesses described as imperious and aggressive, Mr. Kushner suggested that the national committee might not be giving Mr. Trump all the support he was due.
.. Ms. Walsh told Mr. Kushner that the committee had a responsibility to take a broad view of its finances, mapping out a budget for the entire party and ensuring it could remain operational for the rest of the year, and could not solely focus on Mr. Trump’s needs.
.. Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who has become one of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers
.. “The R.N.C. is giving him a lot of support,” Mr. Giuliani said. “He doesn’t have the united Republican Party behind him in the way that a more establishment candidate would.”
Why “New Trump” Isn’t So New
“Sometimes, in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t say the right words or you say the wrong thing,” he said. “I have done that and I regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain.” If you were Megyn Kelly or Carly Fiorina, or Judge Gonzalo Curiel, or a member of the Khan family, would you have been satisfied with these weasel words? No, you wouldn’t.
.. Trump didn’t attack the Khans during “the heat of debate.” He belittled Ghazala Khan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, in a telephone interview with Maureen Dowd, the Times columnist, on the day after the Democratic Convention ended. Then Trump extended his comments to the dead soldier’s father, Khizr Khan, who had criticized him at the Convention, and, despite protests by other Republicans, he kept up his attacks for days.
This wasn’t a verbal slip or an instant response.
.. Instead of fessing up properly, Trump continued to blame the media for highlighting what he says.
.. He claimed, “They will take words of mine out of context and spend a week obsessing over every single syllable, and then pretend to discover some hidden meaning in what I said.” It wasn’t clear which of his many utterances Trump was referring to here. Presumably, it was ambiguous statements like this one: “We have a very hostile judge. Now, he is Hispanic, I believe. He is a very hostile judge to me. I said it loud and clear.” Or perhaps it was this opaque statement: “isis is honoring President Obama. He is the founder of isis.”
.. Among the many things it ignores, however, are these: 1) Trump has just brought in a wealthy former Goldman Sachs investment banker, Steve Bannon, to run his campaign. 2) The person Bannon’s replacing, Manafort, is a prominent Washington lobbyist whose lucrative arrangements with a pro-Russian party in Ukraine had turned into an embarrassing distraction.
.. 3) Before making the personnel changes, Trump met with one of the richest and most reclusive hedge-fund managers in the country, Robert Mercer, who has a long record of supporting ultra-conservative causes, including Breitbart, the controversial news site that Bannon runs.
Trump paid dearly to boost fundraising
The campaign increased its spending in July, but not on building a staff or field organization.
Though the campaign touted an $80 million figure for its July fundraising, just $36.7 million of that total went directly to the campaign.
.. The campaign more than doubled its spending from the previous month to $18.5 million in July, far more than in any other period of the campaign. Most of that money went toward expanding the campaign’s online fundraising operation.
.. A full 45 percent, or $8.4 million, went to Giles-Parscale, the San Antonio-based digital marketing firm that has done Trump’s online advertising. (The company had never worked for a campaign before 2016.) The campaign also paid $100,000 to the Prosper Group for fundraising consulting.
.. Legal fees for the campaign’s outside law firm, Jones Day, gobbled up more than $660,000. The Clinton campaign paid its outside counsel about a sixth of that.