Former President Trump will hold a fundraiser Saturday with expectations of raising $33 million as he tries to narrow the cash advantage that President Biden has built early in the general election race.
Hedge fund founder John Paulson will host the event for Trump in Palm Beach, Fla., after the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee (RNC) brought in $65.6 million during the month of March, a notable improvement after two lackluster months to start the year.
“President Donald J. Trump has again created a fundraising juggernaut among Republicans. While he has been the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party for less than a month, the RNC and Trump campaign are one unified operation and focused on victory,” RNC Chair Michael Whatley said in a statement announcing the March haul.
Those months were before Trump officially became the presumptive GOP nominee and before his campaign formed a joint fundraising committee with the RNC to streamline donations.
Biden raising more than Trump
But Biden has majorly outpaced Trump in the fundraising race so far. The Biden campaign raised $53 million in February to bring its cash on hand to $155 million, while the Trump campaign and its joint fundraising committee took in just more than $20 million in that month, giving it $42 million cash in the bank.
That added to months of Biden outraising Trump, even as both were seen as very likely to be their party’s nominees since the start of their campaigns.
Biden’s campaign notched another huge fundraising haul with a star-studded event last week featuring a conversation with him and former Presidents Obama and Clinton, moderated by late-night host Stephen Colbert. Other celebrities including Queen Latifah, Ben Platt and Lea Michele were also guests.
Trump aims to top Biden
The night ultimately raised $26 million for the Biden campaign, and now Trump will try to top that with an event of his own.
“The response to our fundraising efforts has been overwhelming, and we’ve raised over $33 million so far. There is massive support amongst a broad spectrum of donors. The dinner is relatively small in nature, and we are almost at our cap,” Paulson said in a statement announcing the event.
Who’s on Trump’s guest list?
The event is expected to feature several wealthy guests, including billionaire TikTok investor Jeff Yass and Michael Hodges, a founder of a payday lender. It will also include billionaire John Catsimatidis, who unsuccessfully ran for mayor of New York City in 2013.
The Biden campaign has criticized Paulson and these guests, pointing to comments that Hodges reportedly made in 2019 that contributing to Trump’s reelection campaign could give fellow payday lenders access to his administration. It also went after Yass, who proposed privatizing Social Security in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in 2019.
Co-chairs of the event include Las Vegas-based businessman Robert Bigelow and casino mogul Steve Wynn.
Guests in attendance, who are being asked to contribute $250,000 per person or $814,600 per person as a “chairman” contributor, will receive a personalized copy of Trump’s book, “Our Journey Together,” along with photos from his administration.
The Associated Press contributed.