Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump, April Fundraising edition

The night of Joe Biden's star-studded fundraising event, he made a big point of highlighting the fact that he'd raised $25,000,000 in a single night with the help of some celebrities and presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Less than a week later, Trump announced that he'd raised $50,500,000 at Mar-a-Lago. It's apparent that first Trump fundraiser wasn't a fluke.

This AP article is reporting that "President Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee said Monday that they raised more than $51 million in April, falling well short of the $76 million that Donald Trump and the Republican Party reported taking in for the month." Again, that's another deficit of $25,000,000 between the Biden-DNC team and the Trump-RNC team.

Trouble in Paradise?

Biden’s reelection campaign said it had $192 million in cash-on-hand as of the end of last month, which it said was higher than any Democratic candidate in history. But that was also roughly the same amount it reported having at the end of the year’s first quarter on March 30 — suggesting the campaign was spending funds as quickly as it raised them.

April’s totals were also down sharply from March, when the president’s campaign and the DNC announced taking in more than $90 million.

It sounds like the Biden Campaign is spending money at a faster pace than during the primaries. That isn't surprising. Biden isn't gaining traction with the usual Democrats' base so he's having to buy more votes than he'd anticipated. That's what happens when everything is chaotic and you've taken minorities for granted for years. This strikes me as less-than-honest:

Biden’s campaign says a large war chest has allowed it to undertake major advertising campaigns in key states, and to work with the DNC and state parties to better mobilize would-be supporters before November’s election — far outpacing Trump’s on-the-ground efforts.

Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said April’s haul "is giving us the resources necessary to invest in opening offices, hiring organizers and communicating across our battleground states in order to mobilize the coalition of voters who will decide this election."

In 2016, the RNC, under the leadership of then-chair Reince Priebus, built the Trump GOTV. Trump's responsibility was to excite the masses. When the AP reports that "a large war chest has allowed it to undertake major advertising campaigns in key states," the truth is that the Biden campaign isn't exciting the Democrats' base. They're having to dump this money into advertising to resurrect Biden's sagging poll numbers.

Donald Trump's campaign is on a bit of a run lately, thanks in part to the thoroughly ridiculous treatment he's received in Judge Merchan's courtroom. Merchan hasn't been the impartial jurist that the Constitution requires him to be. Merchan's rulings have felt more like the rulings of a black-robed member of the prosecutor's team.

Alan Dershowitz called Merchan out on Brian Kilmeade's radio program:

I've been in courthouses in every part of the world and in China, in Russia, in Ukraine, in Israel. I've been all over. I've never seen a spectacle like this. And that's why it should have been on television, so the American public could see how outrageous this judge is. And CNN just does his bidding. CNN lies, lies through their teeth about what happened in court yesterday between Judge Merchan and Bob Costello. Bob Costello testifies, Merchan rules against him at every point, keeps out his testimony, makes outrageous rulings that any first-year student taking evidence would know was wrong.

If Merchan stays in the spotlight much longer, Trump's fundrraising numbers will fly through the roof. The American people might not like Trump or Biden but they hate injustice. Here's the Kilmeade-Dershowitz interview: