Trump campaign has over $1 million in outstanding bills from American cities

The Trump campaign’s indifference to municipal bills became a significant issue earlier this month when the city of Minneapolis attempted to get paid in advance for a rally Trump was planning to hold in the city. Trump and his campaign publicly berated Minneapolis’s mayor. But even then it was easy to see why a city would want Trump’s team to pay in advance.

As the Minneapolis rally loomed, CNN went back to a number of cities that had been identified in June by the Center for Public Integrity as places with outstanding bills in to the Trump campaign. CNN found that there was at least $841,000 still outstanding. The total, though, is more than that: Dave Levinthal, who reported the initial tallies for the Center for Public Integrity, confirmed in an email to The Post on Thursday that he’d checked back with all the cities he’d identified in July and that none had been paid as of his most recent outreach.

Adding in a $211,000 bill from Albuquerque, that brings the total outstanding bill to more than $1 million — $1,052,395.78, to be precise. El Paso, which hasn’t been paid for costs from a February rally, added a late fee of about $99,000 earlier this year, bringing the total to $1,151,183.36. Add in the $530,000 that Minneapolis was originally seeking and the total nears $1.7 million.

Earlier this week, the Republican Party celebrated having raised more than $300 million through the first three quarters of 2019. Reimbursing these cities for the costs they incurred from Trump’s rallies, then, would eat up a little more than a day’s average fundraising.

Don’t expect that to happen.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/24/trump-campaign-has-over-million-outstanding-bills-american-cities/