'Farewell tour-vibe': Analyst sees Trump neglecting campaign to make cash for himself

Former President Donald Trump is too busy selling sneakers and other merchandise to focus on actually staffing his campaign properly, Philip Bump argued for The Washington Post on Friday.

The former president is famous for selling campaign supporters bizarre items, including Bibles and $299 sneakers depicting his face after an assassination attempt.

"All presidential candidates make pitches to their supporters, of course," wrote Bump — adding that all supporters of a campaign at some point get annoyed with or tune them out at some point.

"But those appeals are generally centered on efforts to get campaign contributions, money that the campaigns can then spend on getting the candidate elected. But while Trump’s campaign is making those sorts of appeals, the candidate himself is also spending time and energy selling other things for his own account: sneakers, digital images, Bibles, some sort of crypto something or other."

This is not something that candidates usually do, Bump argued — and it barely even feels like a campaign at this point.

"There’s a distinct farewell-tour vibe to his third consecutive presidential campaign, from a not-politically-useful campaign event at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27 to the seeming everything-must-go effort to unload a wide array of Trump-branded items."

All of this is happening as Trump runs his presidential campaign on essentially a skeleton crew. The campaign isn't even doing traditional get-out-the-vote operations, instead farming that out to independent right-wing groups and super PACs like the one funded by tech billionaire Elon Musk.

ALSO READ: He’s a sociopath:' J.D. Vance has Congressional Democrats freaking out

The result is that the Trump campaign has an unusually low spending footprint on staff, even compared to their 2020 outing, which itself employed less than a quarter the number of staffers as former President Barack Obama's re-election in 2012.

Just one percent of Trump's August spending outlays were on payroll, compared to Vice President Kamala Harris' more than 7 percent. And because a lot of these traditional staff operations boost fundraising, he's taking in a lot less money too.

"Perhaps he feels little urgency," to ramp up staffing and fundraising, "given that he is running about even with Vice President Kamala Harris, even though she was outspending him by more than 2 to 1 as of the most recent filing period. Why worry about raising more?" wrote Bump.

"Especially when he could instead push those supporters to buy things that put money in his bank account, rather than the campaign’s."