Trump Leans On Creative Bookkeeping to Keep Up in Cash Race

Trump Leans On Creative Bookkeeping to Keep Up in Cash Race

Donald J. Trump’s official campaign committee has a payroll of fewer than a dozen and has found ways for another account to pick up the tab for his rallies.

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By Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman

Donald J. Trump’s political operation has been taking extraordinary measures in a bid to stay financially competitive with Vice President Kamala Harris, deploying aggressive and creative accounting strategies that test the legal limits of how far a candidate can go to offload the core costs of running for president.

The most startling example is the official payroll of the former president’s campaign committee.

He had only 11 people on it, as of August.

That is a tiny fraction of the more than 200 people Mr. Trump had on his campaign payroll four years ago and the more than 600 people on Ms. Harris’s campaign payroll in August, federal records show.

The reason Mr. Trump now has so few on the payroll is that he is shuffling costs from his campaign committee to other accounts allied or shared with the Republican Party. The goal of the seemingly arcane accounting maneuver is to free up millions of dollars, which would otherwise be locked up in party and fund-raising accounts, to spend on television ads for Mr. Trump.

And the shifting of payroll is just one piece of the financial puzzle.

Mr. Trump has also not been using his campaign committee to pay for many of the big rallies that are the signature events of his campaign, according to two people with knowledge of his accounting who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. Instead, the Trump team is, for accounting purposes, treating those events as fund-raisers by including backstage photo lines for contributors or donor round tables.

Some offloading of staff and other costs onto party or shared accounts is typical in presidential campaigns. A number of people working heavily to elect Ms. Harris, for instance, are on the payroll of the Democratic National Committee. But Mr. Trump has pursued this strategy to the extreme.

“This is bending the rules to their breaking point,” said Dan Weiner, the director of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “It’s clearly exploiting some technical ambiguity in the law to do something that’s never been done before.”

The combined savings on his rallies, the shrunken payroll and some online ads he has also pushed onto joint accounts is expected to top $10 million, and possibly far more.

Brian Hughes, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said the campaign was raising and spending money “in a responsible manner.”

“The Trump-Vance campaign and affiliated committees are in full and complete compliance with all election laws and regulations,” Mr. Hughes said. “Our contributions and expenditures are reported in compliance with those laws and regulations.”

The extent of Mr. Trump’s cost-shuffling, which has not previously been reported, will be revealed in new campaign filings this week. Some of the accounts that Mr. Trump has shifted expenses to have not had to publicly disclose their finances since June 30.

Behind the scenes, Mr. Trump’s advisers have spent months devising ways to shed as many costs as possible from his campaign’s main 2024 committee to avoid what happened four years ago, when he pulled back on some advertising amid a cash crunch in the late stages of the race.

At the core of the Trump approach is the fact that not all cash is created equal in presidential campaigns.

The money in a candidate’s official election committee is the most valuable. It’s the money that generally must be used to pay for expensive television ads at the cheapest rates. It’s also the most scarce because that account has a contribution limit of $3,300 per donor in the general election.

In contrast, the Trump 47 Committee, which splits its proceeds between the Republican National Committee, state parties and the Trump campaign, can collect checks as large as $924,600 per person.

So the Trump team has shifted as many costs as possible onto shared accounts like the Trump 47 Committee or the Republican National Committee itself.

The aggressive accounting appears to be a bet that the federal campaign watchdog agency, the Federal Election Commission, is unlikely to do anything to rein in Mr. Trump. The commission is divided equally between Democrats and Republicans and has generally done little to dissuade or crack down on candidates who stretch the rules.

In fact, an opinion from the Federal Election Commission earlier this year opened the doors for candidates to directly coordinate with otherwise independent super PACs for door-knocking and get-out-the-vote operations. The Trump team for months has discussed how it is relying on those new rules to save money.

In addition to the payroll and rally costs, Mr. Trump’s team has been using another account shared with the party, the Trump National Committee, to pay for millions of dollars in online ads that are virtually identical to ones that have run on television and have been paid for by the campaign.

The difference in those ads is a thin strip at the top with white text that urges people to donate to Mr. Trump. That is enough, the Trump team has determined, to consider them fund-raising pitches rather than traditional ads that a campaign must foot the bill for.

The joint account has paid roughly $5 million for those ads, Google records show.

Last week, the F.E.C. deadlocked on a somewhat similar matter involving Senate Republicans who were using shared accounts with the party to pay for TV ads that asked for donations.

The money Mr. Trump’s campaign has saved on rally costs, payroll and some online advertising is being poured into television ads in the race’s closing weeks. Even as Ms. Harris has raised $1 billion in less than three months, Mr. Trump was set to spend nearly the same amount as her on television in October and November, according to data from AdImpact, an ad-tracking service.

The payroll savings Mr. Trump has achieved is substantial.

In July and August, Mr. Trump reported roughly $333,000 in payroll-related costs compared with $9.25 million for Ms. Harris. Indeed, Ms. Harris has spent roughly the same amount on health insurance ($305,309) as Mr. Trump paid his entire payroll in those months. Both campaigns also pay some advisers, including some of Mr. Trump’s top strategists, through consulting arrangements.

Mr. Trump’s payroll is far smaller now than it was at the start of the year. He had 60 people on his campaign’s payroll who received at least $3,000 in January, records show.

Mr. Trump has even found ways to subsidize the 11 people on his campaign’s official payroll. Five of those officials also received paychecks from his PAC, Save America, in July and August, among them Walt Nauta, his personal aide and former co-defendant in the classified documents case that was dismissed by a Trump-appointed federal judge.

Mr. Trump’s PAC has chiefly paid for legal fees during his presidential run but supported his political operation after he left the White House and until he declared his 2024 candidacy in late 2022.

The rally savings are big, too. The price tags for his bigger events typically climb well above $100,000.

For instance, Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris both held rallies this summer at the same site, the Liacouras Center at Temple University.

Ms. Harris used the arena for her splashy rollout of her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz. Her campaign committee reported paying Temple University more than $325,000 around the time of the event, records show.

Mr. Trump held a rally there in June, but his campaign did not foot the $108,100 rental fee, according to federal records. His joint fund-raising account, the Trump 47 Committee, did.

Rachel Shorey contributed reporting.