Trump Seriously: On the Trail With the GOP’s Tough Guy

Still: Trump, for all his billions, has far less sitting in liquid assets. Bloomberg ran the numbers on his FEC filing and pegged his cash on hand at $70 million; Politico had it closer to $250 million. Either way, it sounds like a lot of money till you factor the per-diem costs of the past couple of presidential cycles. Barack Obama spent about $1.6 million a day at this stage of his first run, in 2007. The price tag may have doubled in the eight years since, though Trump has the cost breaks noted above, so perhaps it’ll only run him the million per. But Obama was raising money as fast as he spent it, while Trump is barely bothering to lift a finger. (At last report, he’d taken in $100,000, or about five percent of what he’s spent already.) Is he really prepared to shell out $30 million a month, and more when the primaries roll around?

“Absolutely,” he tells me. “I’m prepared to underwrite this! I make $400 to $600 million a year.”

Last year, per the figures he himself released, he had $362 million in income, some of that a one-time sale of stocks. This year figures to be a slimmer one: He was summarily dropped by seven business partners when he entered the race raging against “illegals.” Per media estimates, he lost as much as $50 million in those canceled deals, the bulk of it from NBC, his golden goose. It’s been a very pricey couple of months indeed for him, and that goes against the flow of his business model. Since the bad old days of the early Nineties, when the real estate market tanked and his company filed for Chapter 11, owing the banks nearly $1 billion, he’s been much more reluctant to invest hard cash. He owns very little of what gets built now bearing his name, earning many tens of millions by leasing his logo to high-end hotels and resorts. He also reaps license fees from retail products that pretty much cover the spectrum from clothes to liquor, though he’s lost the great buzz machine that was The Apprentice, and with it, the multi-million-dollar salary that earned him $213 million over 14 years.

But politics isn’t like selling vodka that someone else makes and mass-distributes. It’s the ultimate high-risk, low-return endeavor, in which $5 billion will be spent, in total, this cycle, most of it by candidates with slim hopes. Will Trump go all-in on his bet with himself, selling off assets as he goes? Or will he turn at some point to the people he denounces – the hedge-fund guys and influence-peddlers who fund the Super PACs of his rivals – and quietly make his terms with them? If so, what becomes of the clenched-fist crowds he’s been drawing in record numbers at every stop? Here
is the bind Trump finds himself in as he buckles down to a long and arduous run. He has carved his mark as the exception to every rule: the teller of dark truths; the man too rich to bribe. Any deviation, any hint of half-stepping, will cost him far more than it would, say, Bush or Ted Cruz. Why? Because Trump’s central claim is he’s not them. The day his backers doubt that is the day he starts unraveling. They’ve been burned too many times to grant second chances.