NYT:

Donald J. Trump took steps to appropriate much of the Republican National Committee’s financial and political infrastructure for his presidential campaign on Monday, amid signs that he and the party would lag dangerously behind the Democrats in raising money for the general election.

Mr. Trump, who by the end of March had spent around $40 million of his fortune on the primaries, has said that he may need as much as $1.5 billion for the fall campaign, but that he will seek to raise it from donors rather than continue to self-finance.

But Mr. Trump has no fund-raising apparatus to resort to, no network of prolific bundlers to call upon, and little known experience with the type of marathon, one-on-one serial salesmanship and solicitousness that raising so much money is likely to require — even if individuals can contribute up to the current limit of $334,000 at a time to the party. And he has to do it all in six months, with a deeply divided party that is still absorbing the fact that Mr. Trump is its standard-bearer….

Republican Party officials have pressed Mr. Trump to sign a joint fund-raising agreement, which would allow him to raise money for the national committee and for his own campaign simultaneously. That, in turn, would also give Mr. Trump a defensible answer for why, after months of railing against Wall Street executives and special interests, he recently turned to a former Goldman Sachs executive, Steven Mnuchin, to corral large checks for his campaign.

Both Mr. Trump’s aides and party officials were caught by surprise by the abrupt end of the primary contest last week, when Mr. Trump carried Indiana, prompting Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio to withdraw from the race. But the two sides have hurried to wrap up a joint fund-raising agreement, and one is close to being signed, according to people close to the national committee who were not authorized to speak publicly.