Trump's Legal Bills Are Skyrocketing

Former President Donald Trump's legal battles may have fired up enough voters to keep him on top in the 2024 GOP presidential polls, but his campaign's bank accounts appear to be spiraling downward as a result.

Several of Trump's political action committees—particularly, the Save America PAC established to cover his legal expenses—racked up more than $40 million in legal expenses over the past six months. According to campaign finance reports filed late Monday evening, thetotal dwarfed the entire campaign budgets of several of his opponents and sent his campaign on a trajectory toward bankruptcy despite his history of strong fundraising.

The total was also substantially more than the roughly $3.23 million amassed by the PAC through the final six months of 2022—a sign that the indictments against Trump are beginning to add up in very real terms for the campaign.

According to the filings published Monday, Trump paid out 403 separate expenses for legal-related costs in the first half of 2023, with payments ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars to California attorney Harmeet Dhillon—who defended Trump against inquiries by the Congressional Select Committee Investigating the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol—to nearly $2 million in payments for the services of Joe Tacopina, the attorney who helmed Trump's defense in a civil rape trial involving journalist E. Jean Carroll.

Millions more were spent to retain Christopher Kise, a top Florida attorney who has led Trump's defense in a federal criminal case over his removal of classified documents from the White House after his time as president, while other top earners included New York City attorney Alina Habba, who was named the Trump campaign's general counsel in July after earning several million dollars defending him against fraud allegations made by the New York State Attorney General's Office late last year.

Newsweek reached out to Trump's campaign via email for comment.

The sheer scale of the Trump campaign's legal spending quickly attracted the scorn of supporters of his top opponent in the presidential race, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, with many characterizing Trump's presidential campaign as an operation in freefall burdened by the errors of a flawed candidate.

The mounting legal fees also come as Trump has continued to leave various cities where he has held rallies to absorb the substantial expenses incurred by his campaign—mirroring a habit that dates to his first run for the presidency in 2016. Trump's Independence Day weekend rally in Pickens, South Carolina, for example, cost the local government $40,000 in various services, raising questions among local leaders of whether to invoice the campaign or foot the bill themselves with taxpayer dollars.

Whether that's enough to turn off prospective donors, however, is another story. Trump, who is polling well above 50 percent in most national polls, has a long history as an effective fundraiser, and he has developed a reputation for exploiting lawsuits filed against him as a prompt for donations in fundraising materials.

Most of his supporters, meanwhile, appear to believe the legal expenses paid by his campaign are a necessary expense, little more than a cost of doing business against the Washington, D.C., establishment that Trump has long claimed seeks to deny him a second term in the Oval Office.

According to a New York Times/Siena College poll of more than 1,300 registered voters nationwide released this week, just 17 percent of voters believe Trump has committed any serious federal crimes, while—in a head-to-head contest against DeSantis—Trump still received 22 percent of the vote among those who believed he committed serious federal crimes, 5 percentage points higher than DeSantis.

Regardless, the campaign already appears to be retooling itself to absorb Trump's litigation costs. According to a report published in the New York Times on Sunday, the Trump campaign recently established a secondary legal defense fund called the Patriot Legal Defense Fund in order to finance his continuing legal battles.

And unlike his various campaign accounts, whoever is footing the bill will not be subject to public scrutiny.

Update 02/08/2023 10.53 a.m. ET: This article has been updated for clarity.