-President Trump has been fundraising
for his 2020 re-election campaign since 2017,
and it's paying off.
This is really a re-election machine
like we have never seen before.
President Trump and the committees
that raise money for his candidacy
have raised more than $100 million for his 2020 campaign.
This is unheard of for any sitting president,
certainly any sitting modern president
that we have been tracking.
President Trump has been fundraising
for his 2020 campaign since after he got elected.
And presidents before him didn't do that.
They usually waited until after the midterms to campaign
for their own re-election.
And if history repeats itself,
not even bad news from the Mueller investigation
will impact Trump's positive fundraising momentum.
Every time there's some major news
involving the special counsel,
you see President Trump's campaign
and the RNC fundraising off of it,
and they're very successful in doing that.
What they do is they tell President Trump's base,
"President Trump is under attack.
The Democrats are coming after him.
We need your money. We need your support.
Please sign this petition.
Please support him.
Donate $5. Donate $20."
And it works.
In addition to President Trump's fundraising,
the RNC has really been a massive machine
of getting out voters and raising a lot of money,
especially in small-dollar fundraising.
The Post has reported that more than half the money
committees raise in the most recent fundraising quarter
came from individual supporters
who are giving in amounts of $200 or less.
And those supporters are turning up at Trump rallies,
adding their names to the Republican National Committee's
expanding voter database.
The Democratic National Committee,
on the other hand, isn't having the same fundraising luck.
The Democratic National Committee has been rebuilding
since the loss of Hillary Clinton in 2016,
and they are still trying to get donors
to have trust in them again,
to show donors that 2020 is gonna be different from 2016.
So compared to, for example, Senator Elizabeth
Warren from Massachusetts -- -Today I announced
an exploratory committee for President of the United States.
-Senator Warren has less than $13 million in cash on hand,
and she's gonna be competing with maybe 25,
30 different candidates for the primaries.
So when you compare the amount of money
that a Democratic presidential candidate is gonna need
in order to compete with President Trump,
it's just really unfathomable
how difficult that's gonna be for the Democrat.
When it comes to reaching his voters,
Trump has already tested his strategy.
-We saw a preview of how the president is going to take
on the political strategy in 2020,
as he did in 2018, and as he did in 2016.
Because this is not a guy
who wants to moderate or change his views.
So I would expect a lot of talk about immigration,
a lot of talk about these core base issues,
about trade, that really propelled him
to the top of the nomination pile in 2016
and won him to victory in 2016.
We see how hard-lined he went on immigration,
particularly in the final days,
final weeks of the 2018 campaign, in the midterms.
-Bob Casey even voted against Kate's Law,
named for Kate Steinle, who was gunned down
by a five-time-deported illegal alien,
should have never been in our country.
-And I would not expect that to change at all
from this president in his re-election bid.
-Another realm where Trump already has a huge head
start is online.
-President Trump's re-election campaign
is already a huge advertiser on Google and Facebook.
This is all data gathering that the Trump campaign
has been doing so well already.
You know, to run a Facebook ad or a Google ad,
it doesn't cost a whole lot of money,
but to run a well-placed ad
and have a well-paid digital team
that's smart and the best in the business
to be able to run that kind of campaign,
that's where it costs a lot of money.
Anyone who wants to run against President Trump
is gonna need to build a digital advertising
and fundraising campaign quickly and well.
Money is not everything for a political campaign.
Hillary Clinton out-raised Trump in 2016, but she lost.
So this huge fundraising start that President Trump
has doesn't mean that he's guaranteed to win in 2020,
but it certainly gives him a good head start.