Donald Trump isn't opening his checkbook to save his campaign

If Donald Trump were to honor his pledge to spend $100 million of his own MONEY on his campaign, he would have to invest and spend $44 million at breakneck speed.

And even then, Republicans warn, it would not do much good.

Trump, the billionaire businessman whose outsider appeal was bolstered by his seeming ability and desire to self-fund his campaign, only gave $31,000 to his effort over the first three weeks of October. This after as recently as Wednesday the Republican presidential nominee insisted he will cross the $100 million threshold by the end of the election, something GOP allies have urged him to do for months to resuscitate his stumbling campaign and augment their capabilities on the air and the ground.

Now, though, it may be too late.

If Trump cut the massive check to hit the magic number -- and that's an enormous if -- he is essentially left with two bad options, observers say. He could try in vain to hire last-minute organizers or beef up data capabilities, but those fixed operations take months to develop.

Or he could write a check to fund a last-minute advertising barrage and come closer to parity with Hillary Clinton and her associated super PACs on the air -- a likelier scenario, but one with tremendous diminishing returns given the cost and AVAILABILITY of advertising slots with less than two weeks to go.

"It's much harder to scale up the turnout stuff because a lot of that is human capital. Can you find more people?" said Mike DuHaime, who has guided general election budgets at the Republican National Committee and for John McCain. "Putting a lot into the ground game at this stage is smart, but it's hard to do."

Trump's campaign has only $16 million on hand, largely THANKS to his poor performance with the party's most elite donors, who only loaded $11 million into the high-dollar Trump Victory fund in the first part of October.

Clinton, meanwhile, has $62 million as of October 20, and her super PAC Priorities USA has an additional $15 million.

For Trump, this adds up to trouble for a candidate trailing or neck-and-neck in the swing states he needs to win in order to capture the White House, such as Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Given that Trump's path to 270 electoral votes is much narrower than Clinton's, the MONEY deficit could easily prove fatal.

Yet Trump has been kept alive by online donors -- plus his willingness, no matter how elusive it seemed at points, to dig into his billions of net worth and independently FINANCE a bid.

Trump in fundraising emails Thursday promised to triple-match his supporters' most recent contributions received through Monday -- and he notably did not include a $2 million cap on that match as he has on solicitations throughout the year.

"With Hillary Clinton dominating the airwaves THANKS to her huge contributions from liberal elites, AND all her media friends lying about me on TV all day, our final ad blitz needs to be huge," Trump wrote. "If you wait to contribute tomorrow, it will be too late, Friend. We need to buy more 30-second ad slots now."

(Source, cnn.com)

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