The staggering scale of Donald Trump’s speaking fees

[ad_1]

Comment on this storyComment

On the 2016 presidential campaign trail, Donald Trump often mentioned the amount of money his opponent Hillary Clinton made in speeches. He disparaged who paid Clinton for her speeches, and that her husband, former president Bill Clinton, gave speeches to business groups before the government while Hillary Clinton served in the Barack Obama administration. . All this is evidence that he is crooked, he says.

Not to mention that he paid too much.

Special interests pay him for speeches, Trump said at a rally in Michigan in September 2016. And he’s not a good speaker! Not a good speaker. They pay him a lot of money. Who wants to hear Hillary Clinton speak and pay her $200,000, $300,000, $400,000, $500,000? WHO?

Like so many things Trump criticized on the 2016 campaign trail, he eventually decided that the post-government-service speaking tour was worth his time. In a financial disclosure made public this week, Trump reportedly made millions of dollars in payments for frequent speaking engagements with political allies and, apparently, less frequently at his own properties. property

Sign up for How To Read This Chart, a weekly data newsletter from Philip Bump

To put Trump’s numbers in context, let’s look at other past presidential candidates. We can begin, appropriately, with Clinton.

In his 2016 disclosure, he listed 22 speeches for which he was paid $5.25 million.

That was in 2015 dollars, mind you. If we adjust those numbers to account for inflation, he made the equivalent of $6.7 million in 2023 dollars. The most useful speech was given to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM).

That’s a big jump over the 2012 Republican nominee, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. He reported four speeches that year, for which he earned less than $260,000 in 2023 dollars.

Clinton’s speeches in 2016 were more profitable than Joe Biden’s before he was elected president. In the Bidens 2020 reveal, he listed four speeches where he earned nearly half a million dollars in total.

He also listed three speeches from his wife, Jill, which brought the family’s total to about $660,000 in 2023 dollars.

Hillary Clinton’s speeches listed above are not her only. He and Bill Clinton made tens of millions of dollars in speaking fees after Shed left the Obama administration. But they did it in a number of relatively small chunks.

Trump, of course, entered politics as a celebrity. So while he didn’t have many speeches listed in his 2016 disclosure, he did have one, for multilevel marketing firm ACN, that made him $450,000 or nearly $600,000 in 2023 dollars. That easily surpassed Clinton’s most profitable speech during the same period.

However, upon leaving office, Trump found out how much money there was to make. In his disclosure made public this week, he listed 11 speeches made to him beyond his ACN speech. That includes three speaking engagements of $1 million or more: commentating a boxing match in Florida, speaking with the company Cardone Enterprises and addressing the Universal Peace Federation World Summit. He also reported more than $1 million from his speaking tour with former Fox News host Bill OReilly.

Adjusted for 2023 dollars, 11 of Trumps 14 reported speeches were more profitable than Clinton’s highest paid speech reported in 2016. He earned nearly twice as much in 2023 dollars as Clinton’s reported in that year.

And that’s just Trump. His wife Melania also gave several speeches that earned more than $1 million in total.

For both Donald and Melania Trump, many of the speeches hit close to home. Five of the speeches, which earned the couple nearly $2 million, were listed as having taken place in Palm Beach, Fla., (where Mar-a-Lago is located) or Bedminster, NJ, (site of the club where of the Trumps the summer).

Trump’s speeches are also frequent to groups within his wider political universe. If someone asks Trump’s question about Clinton in 2016 about her own speeches, there is a clear answer. Who wants to hear Trump speak and pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars? His political supporters and, it seems safe to assume, some who want to build a strong relationship with a man running for president again.

In December, after he announced his 2024 presidential candidacy, Trump made $900,000 from WHIP Fundraising, a group that took the Trumps nearly $2.3 million to speak at events, according to the new disclosure. There are likely to be no complaints from Trumpworld about the optics of such a deal.

This article is a gift. Gift Article

[ad_2]