Trump is raking in mountains of cash ahead of 2020

Want the best from VICE News in your inbox? Sign up here.

For all the excitement surrounding the fundraising efforts of Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris, Donald Trump has outpaced them both — combined.

Trump’s 2020 campaign has announced it raked in $30.3 million in the first quarter alone, which far outpaces all the Democratic hopefuls, including the top two fundraisers, Sanders ($18.2 million) and Harris ($12 million). Granted, Trump’s the incumbent, and the Democratic field of more than a dozen candidates is splitting the donor dollars.

Trump’s campaign emphasized that almost all of the donations came from grassroots supporters, with nearly 99 percent of the donations at $200 or less and an average donation of just $34.

But it’s not just Trump’s own campaign benefiting from his extremely unconventional brand of presidency: The Republican National Committee announced it had pulled in $46 million in donations during the same period.

RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said the campaign had raised over a million dollars in a single day eight times in 2019 and has added 100,000 new donors since the start of the year.

The combined total gives Trump a war chest of over $80 million — an unprecedented amount at this stage of a re-election campaign.

In April 2011, Barack Obama had raised just $2 million toward his re-election. He would go on to raise over $720 million but the Trump campaign has set an ambitious target of $1 billion total.

Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Pascale celebrated the fundraising effort on Twitter, calling it an “excellent first quarter.”

Parscale said in a statement that his boss “is in a vastly stronger position at this point than any previous incumbent president running for re-election, and only continues to build momentum.”

That momentum started on Day One of his presidency, when Trump filed re-election papers hours after he was inaugurated. Since then Trump has been amassing a huge war chest, as well as building out a full-fledged campaign organization that has branches to focus on major donations as well as small donations.

All 2020 presidential candidates have to meet a Monday deadline for filing financial information to the Federal Election Commission.