November 7, 2016

Trump Promised to Fund His Own Campaign. Now He’s Asking for Pizza Money.

He hasn’t come close to matching his pledge to spend $100 million on the campaign, and he’s still asking for more.

Todor Tsvetkov/iStock

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Donald Trump’s campaign blasted out a fundraising email this morning asking for pizza money.

Trump has repeatedly vowed to self-fund his campaign in order to avoid becoming indebted to special interests. He continued to claim he was self-funding the effort even after he worked to fundraise and court wealthy donors. On the eve of the election, Trump has shoveled an estimated $66 million into his campaign—a substantial amount, but far less than the $100 million he promised. And in an email this morning, the Trump campaign once again put out its hand to supporters, in a pitch for more money that very clearly was targeted at small donors.

Obviously, the purchase of snacks for volunteers might just be a ruse to elicit sympathy from small donors; fundraising emails from candidates on both sides often stretch the truth when it comes to the urgency of donations. How much money Trump’s campaign really has on hand to buy pizza won’t be known until well after the election, but at the last filing Trump’s campaign reported having just $15 million on hand.

Last week, the Trump campaign announced it had raised $100 million from small donors in the month of October. That would have required the campaign to raise $65 million since the last official report, filed on October 19. There is no way to confirm that total before the election.

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Managing an independent, nonprofit newsroom is staggeringly hard. There’s no cushion in our budget—no backup revenue, no corporate safety net. We can’t afford to fall short, and we can’t rely on corporations or deep-pocketed interests to fund the fierce, investigative journalism Mother Jones exists to do.

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