Donald Trump’s presidential campaign announced on Thursday that the presumptive Republican nominee had “fully extinguished” his loans to his presidential campaign.
The Trump campaign announced the loans totaled more than $50m, although the Federal Election Commission (FEC) only lists $45,703,185 loaned by the candidate to the campaign.
Although no documentation had been filed with the FEC online on Thursday afternoon, a Trump spokesperson told the Guardian: “My understanding is it is in process and will be completed today.”
In forgiving the loans, Trump sent a major signal to Republican donors who were worried that he would use campaign contributions to reimburse himself. So far, Trump has only raised $17m in individual contributions, many of which have come from small donors buying hats from his campaign.
In order to run a competitive campaign against Hillary Clinton in November, most observers agree Trump needs to ramp up fundraising significantly. He has held few fundraisers and only sent out his first fundraising email on Tuesday. In a fundraising email on Wednesday sent by Donald Trump Jr, the scion claimed that the campaign had raised $2m from that initial fundraising email.
Trump has long boasted that he was self-funding his campaign as a way to establish his bona fides as a candidate independent of Washington special interests. However, despite his claims that he is worth $10bn, outside experts have long looked skeptically at those assertions and many have raised questions about how much of his assets are actually liquid and easily available to be spent on the campaign.
In his most recent campaign finance report, Trump had spent $1.1m, nearly 20% of his overall spending in May, on businesses that he owned. This included more than $423,000 on facility rental and catering at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, and another $350,000 on travel air on Tag Air, the holding company that owns Trump’s jet.
