"Self-Funding" Donald Trump Asks Supporters for $100,000 in "Emergency" Email Plea

Impact

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who has at times threatened to self-fund his own campaign rather than raise money for the Republican Party, sent out his first "emergency" fundraising email to donors Saturday, CNN reported.

"Crooked Hillary is about to invade your TV with ads attacking Mr. Trump," the email reads, according to CNN. "But we're preparing to fight back. Right now we're facing an emergency goal of $100,000 to help get our ads on the air. We need your contribution by 11:59 p.m. tonight."

The pitch references several supposed scandals involving presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, including an ongoing investigation into her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state and theories she helped cover up an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.

While such pleas are par for the course in any campaign, $100,000 is pretty much chump change in presidential politics; in 2012, candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney raised over $1 billion over the lifetime of their campaigns, an amount that doesn't capture hundreds of millions of dollars in independent super PAC spending.

Compared to Clinton, Trump is way behind on fundraising. According to Fox Business, the latest filings show Trump has raised $14 million in unsolicited donations and lent his own campaign $43 million, while Clinton has already soaked up $204 million in donations.

But even amid the push for the tiny amount, Trump threatened to stop joint fundraising activities at a rally Saturday in Las Vegas, CNN also reported.

"Life is like two way street, right?" Trump told the crowd. "Otherwise I'll just keep doing what I'm doing. I'll just keep funding my own campaign. I'm okay with that. That's the easy way. I mean for me, that's the easy way. But, hopefully I can continue to go the way we're going, and this weekend we raised a lot of money. We've raised a lot of money for the Republican Party. We'll keep doing it, because we do have tremendous support within the party that I can tell you."

Trump isn't exactly making it easy for himself otherwise.

"While Trump had promised [RNC chair Reince Priebus] that he would call two dozen top GOP donors, when RNC chief of staff Katie Walsh recently presented Trump with a list of more than 20 donors, he called only three before stopping, according to two sources familiar with the situation," Politico reported Wednesday. "It's unclear whether he resumed the donor calls later."

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