MAGA Inc., the main super PAC supporting President Trump, raised $198.9 million between the election and the end of June. The fundraising spree is unprecedented just months into a president’s term, made all the more striking because Trump is constitutionally barred from running for reelection.
MAGA Inc.’s haul is more than six times the prior fundraising record for presidential super PACs this early in the cycle, when groups supportive of Joe Biden raised $32.5 million between his election and the midpoint of 2021. During Trump’s first term, supportive super PACs raised just $2.5 million by this point. Barack Obama — the only other lame-duck president since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision deregulating campaign financing — received less than $500,000 in super PAC support by June 2013.
Super PACs were created in 2010 after Citizens United and other court decisions invalidated limits on campaign finance spending that is independent of campaigns and parties. The courts’ theory is that there’s no danger of corruption or the appearance of corruption if a political candidate or party never has direct control of the money, but the massive amounts of money and close connections between super PACs and politicians cast doubt on that idea.
MAGA Inc. is not the only vehicle for big money support for Trump. The nonprofit Securing American Greatness, which is a dark money group because it does not disclose it donors, is raising unknown sums. In 2024, both Securing American Greatness and the predecessor to MAGA Inc. were run by Taylor Budowich, who also worked for Trump’s 2020 campaign and his leadership PAC, Save America. Budowich is now deputy chief of staff for communications in the White House. Anonymous sources claim that the two groups together have raised $400 million, but there’s no way to verify that figure. Records do show that the dark money group has transferred $13.8 million to the super PAC this year.
MAGA Inc. has spent virtually none of its haul so far, but Securing American Greatness reportedly spent $17 million earlier this year on ads targeting members of Congress to pressure them to vote for Trump’s budget. It remains to be seen how much MAGA Inc. and Securing American Greatness will spend to influence next year’s congressional races.
In a sign that this financing push is almost exclusively a game for the richest of the rich, 96 percent of the money to MAGA Inc. comes from donors who gave more than $1 million each.