After a horrible fundraising haul in May, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign got to work in June and was able to narrow the gap with Hillary Clinton’s fundraising powerhouse.
The latest monthly report to the Federal Election Commission released Wednesday night showed that Trump raised $21.9 million, a significant improvement over its meager May numbers. Clinton raised $23.8 million in the same time period.
While Trump had $20.2 million cash on hand at the beginning of July, Clinton had $44.4 million cash on hand. Still, the businessman has substantially more than the $1.29 million in cash on hand than reported the previous month.
The new report also showed that Trump had forgiven all of his personal loans to the campaign, as he had promised to do. The $21.9 million raised in June included more than $2 million contributed by Trump personally. Clinton herself donated $97,735 to her campaign.
Trump’s campaign released a long-winded and confusing statement early this month that was widely covered as showing it had raised at least $51 million in June. But the wording of the statement made it seem as if some of that had been raised in May, while another portion appeared to have been raised in conjunction with the Republican National Committee to support other Republican candidates’ campaigns.
At that time, Trump’s team chalked up his low fundraising totals to its tight campaign infrastructure. Trump has kept his campaign team notoriously small and has repeatedly touted the fact that he had been running a self-funded campaign. He has seemed to ease off that line in recent months, though.
Trump had vowed to work with the Republican National Committee to raise the millions necessary to launch a general election campaign. Yet Politico reported that in one instance, Trump had only called up a fraction of the donors from a list the RNC gave him.
In late June, two watchdog groups said they planned to file a complaint with the FEC that argued Trump broke federal campaign finance laws by sending fundraising emails to foreign leaders.
This post has been updated.
