Four weeks after Donald Trump’s campaign made a big splash with its first fundraiser in Los Angeles, new Federal Election Commission filings suggest the event wasn’t quite so splashy, after all.
At the time, the campaign bragged that it pulled in $6 million from some 100 donors, with pledges for an additional $4 million, through a recently drafted fundraising agreement with the Republican National Committee.
But the RNC’s report filed Monday evening shows that Trump’s “Victory Committee” transferred to the party a total of $3.1 million raised in the days surrounding the reception and dinner at the LA home of investor Tom Barrack.
“That's astounding,” said Florida GOP consultant Rick Wilson, a longtime Trump critic who predicted that the weak showing would make donors distrust Trump even more. “It's even worse than everyone's been expecting."
Neither the Trump campaign nor the RNC responded to The Huffington Post's queries about the fundraising figures.
The Trump campaign appeared to take no transfers from the joint committee in May, according to the filing. (It's not required to -- the money can remain in the joint committee’s account, and that committee does not have to file its FEC report until later this summer.) And donors whose names appear in the RNC report as having given to Trump Victory do not appear in Trump's filing.
But because donors to the joint committee can give the various RNC accounts more than $330,000 per person, compared with a $5,400 maximum for the candidate, the RNC’s total should include most of what was raised at the event.
Stuart Stevens, a veteran of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, said he wasn’t that surprised about the exaggerated numbers.
“They lie about everything. They even lie about crowd size,” Stevens said of Trump's campaign.
But it's the overall dismal financial state of the campaign that should worry party leaders, Stevens said.
“Romney raised over $100 million a month,” he added. “Without that, you’re out of luck. That’s what turns on the lights. That’s what pays the bills. ... The whole thing is a disaster.”
Trump, though, has already started blaming Republicans for not supporting him more enthusiastically.
“It would be nice if the Republicans stuck together,” Trump told NBC News over the weekend. “I'm a different kind of a candidate. I think that I win either way. I can win one way or the other.”
And, at a rally in Las Vegas on Saturday, Trump said that if Republicans don’t come around, he would simply pay for it all himself.
“I'll keep doing what I'm doing. Funding my own campaign. That's the easy way,” he said.
Trump claims a net worth of more than $10 billion, although independent estimates suggest he is not worth even half of that. What’s more, the vast majority of whatever wealth he may have is tied up in buildings and golf courses, with less than $200 million in cash and relatively liquid assets, according to his financial disclosure filings.
Editor's note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims -- 1.6 billion members of an entire religion -- from entering the U.S.
