Manager: Trump won't seek repayment for campaign funding
WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump says he has spent $30 million so far running for president, and his campaign manager says he's never getting that money back.
Trump, it turns out, is following the standard practice of wealthy candidates who use their own money for presidential campaigns, a review of Federal Election Commission records shows.
Just like Trump in 2016, Jon Huntsman in 2012, Mitt Romney in 2008 and Steve Forbes in 1996 each made multimillion-dollar loans to their presidential campaigns, which they never repaid.
Loans keep alive the possibility that Trump can make his money back from traditional donations later in the campaign, after months of reaping the political benefits of asserting he's self-funding.
Charlie Spies, a Republican campaign attorney and public Trump critic, said Trump's use of campaign loans "sets up the ironic and potentially dishonest situation where he could end up using donated money to pay himself back."
(He used campaign contributions to reimburse himself for $490,000 of that amount, FEC documents show.) When Forbes ran four years later, he eschewed loans altogether, personally contributing $76 million to his failed cause.
If Trump changes his mind and ends up raising enough money, he has only until Election Day to repay his loans, said Bob Biersack, a senior fellow at the Center for Responsive Politics who was an FEC employee for 30 years.