World
Trump dwarfs Biden in latest fundraising numbers in show of political force after felony convictions
NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump’s campaign outraised President Joe Biden by more than $60 million last month, according to federal filings made public Thursday that detailed the Republican fundraising explosion sparked by Trump’s felony convictions.
Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee together raised a robust $85 million in May and reported $212 million in the bank at the end of the month. The strong showing does not include roughly $40 million raised by Biden and his top surrogates in recent days — or a separate $20 million donation from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to pro-Biden groups.
Still, Trump’s fundraising for, for one month at least, seemed to dwarf Biden’s.
The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee said it raised a jaw-dropping $141 million in May, including tens of millions donated immediately after Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in the New York hush money case. At the same time, billionaire Timothy Mellon, donated a stunning $50 million to a pro-Trump super PAC the day after Trump’s guilty verdict, according to filings made public Thursday.
Trump’s campaign declined to report how much money it had in the bank at the end of May, prompting Biden’s campaign to question whether the groups were still spending heavily to cover Trump’s legal fees.
“Our strong and consistent fundraising program grew by millions of people in May, a clear sign of strong and growing enthusiasm for the president and vice president every single month,” said Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez. “The money we continue to raise matters, and it’s helping the campaign build out an operation that invests in reaching and winning the voters who will decide this election –- a stark contrast to Trump’s PR stunts and photo-ops that he’s pretending is a campaign.
What to know about the 2024 Election
Taken together, the numbers detailed in the campaigns’ latest Federal Election Commission filings suggest that Democrats may still maintain a cash advantage in the 2024 presidential contest. But almost four months before Election Day, Trump’s side is closing the gap — if it isn’t closed already.
The new fundraising figures also underscore the extent to which the rules of presidential politics are being re-written in the Trump era.
At almost any other time in U.S. history, a presidential candidate would have been forced to leave an election after being convicted of dozens of felonies. But in 2024, Trump’s guilty verdict has instead fueled a massive fundraising surge that puts his team in a position to ramp up advertising and swing state infrastructure just as voters begin paying closer attention to the election.
Backed by Mellon’s massive donation, the pro-Trump super PAC known as MAGA Inc. reserved $3.5 million in television advertising set to begin July 3 across Georgia and Pennsylvania on Thursday, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact. Overall, the group reported a $68.8 million haul for May, ending the month with $93.7 million in the bank.
Mellon has been among the biggest donors to Trump and independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., although his support for Kennedy may be fading.
Kennedy raised $2.6 million last month and finished May with $6.4 million in the bank. The vast majority of his fundraising total came from running mate Nicole Shanahan, a wealthy Silicon Valley lawyer. The Kennedy campaign spent more than it raised for the month.
The numbers reported on Thursday did not include anything raised in June, including roughly $40 million raised by Biden and his top surrogates in recent days. The vast majority came from a glitzy fundraiser last Saturday with movie stars and former President Barack Obama in Los Angeles that raised more than $30 million. First lady Jill Biden also has been on her own personal fundraising swing that has brought in $1.5 million.
Meanwhile, Biden also got a big boost from Bloomberg.
The billionaire philanthropist, who briefly ran for president as a Democrat in 2020, sent $19 million to the pro-Biden group Future Forward in addition to sending the legal maximum of $929,600 to the Biden Victory Fund, according to a person familiar with the transfers.
Bloomberg also formally endorsed Biden on Thursday. “I stood with Joe Biden in 2020, and I am proud to do so again,” Bloomberg said in a statement.
The Biden campaign said that the vast majority of its latest fundraising came from grassroots donors such as nurses, teachers and retirees. Overall, the Biden campaign and Democratic National Committee attracted more than three million new donors last month, according to a statement from the campaign.
“While Trump is leaching off his billionaire sycophants, our campaign represents the voices of America, and we’re honored to have their support as we race toward November,” Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison said.
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AP writer Seung Min Kim in Washington and Jill Colvin in New York contributed.
World
Video: Europeans Remain Wary as Trump Promises to Deploy Troops to Poland
new video loaded: Europeans Remain Wary as Trump Promises to Deploy Troops to Poland
transcript
transcript
Europeans Remain Wary as Trump Promises to Deploy Troops to Poland
President Trump has promised to deploy 5,000 U.S. troops to Poland, seemingly reversing course from his previous statements. NATO allies responded cautiously during a summit on Friday and pushed for greater military self-reliance.
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“Well, of course I welcome the announcement. Our military commanders are working through all the details, but of course I welcome it. But let’s be clear: The trajectory we are on, which is a stronger Europe and a stronger NATO, making sure we will over time, step by step, be less reliant on one ally only, as we have been for so long, which is the United States.” “Well, it is confusing indeed, and not always easy to navigate. But we need to continue to focus on what we do, and not what everyone else says.”
By Jorge Mitssunaga
May 22, 2026
World
Mojtaba Khamenei using ‘bin Laden template’ to survive, learned from Abbottabad: analyst
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Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has spent nearly three months in hiding as tensions with the U.S. escalate — a disappearance that counterterrorism analysts say mirrors the final years of al Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden.
The comparison comes amid a critical standoff between Washington and Tehran that prompted President Donald Trump to pause a planned strike on May 19. On Wednesday, Trump told reporters he was in “no hurry.”
Khamenei, meanwhile, appeared to share three posts on his official X account on May 18 but remains out of public view.
“For the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic, the United States has done to Tehran what it spent two decades doing to al-Qaeda and ISIS,” counterterrorism expert Dr. Omar Mohammed told Fox News Digital.
THE MISSING MULLAH: IRAN’S ‘SUPREME LEADER’ A NO-SHOW FOR NEGOTIATIONS, THEN HID AS US POUNDED NUKE SITES
Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is shown in a portrait image. (Fox News)
“The U.S. has driven its leader into the same kind of operational invisibility that bin Laden lived in for 10 years in Abbottabad,” he added.
“Both Mojtaba Khamenei and bin Laden inherited their status on the back of an American operation, and both responded the same way: by ceasing to exist publicly,” Mohammed said before adding that bin Laden “stopped releasing dated videos around 2007 and confined himself to audio messages carried by hand.”
Bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in the late 1980s and masterminded the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States.
After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, bin Laden evaded capture for a decade by hiding inside a fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
To avoid Western electronic surveillance, he severed his digital footprint and relied exclusively on a network of physical couriers, said Mohammed, an expert with the Antisemitism Research Initiative at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.
U.S. intelligence eventually tracked one of those couriers to the compound, culminating in the 2011 Navy SEAL raid that killed the al Qaeda leader.
OPERATION EPIC FURY: HOW AMERICA’S AIR POWER IS CRUSHING IRAN’S TERROR REGIME
Portrait of former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden was killed in 2011 in a daring SEAL Team 6 raid in Pakistan. (Photo by Stephane Ruet/Sygma via Getty Images)
“Bin Laden survived with no cables out of the Abbottabad compound. Communications were carried by hand by two trusted couriers, the Kuwaiti brothers,” Mohammed said.
“Bin Laden stayed hidden for the rest of his life because the moment he surfaced was the moment he died. Mojtaba’s incentives point the same way. Mojtaba Khamenei won’t emerge,” he said.
“The Abbottabad lesson, which Tehran will have studied closely, is that the safest hiding place is not a cave in Tora Bora but a walled compound in a garrison town,” Mohammed added, recalling how U.S. forces targeted bin Laden in the cave complex before he escaped.
Bin Laden also lived roughly a mile from Pakistan’s top military academy, hiding in plain sight behind high concrete walls and barbed wire, Mohammed noted.
“The logical Iranian equivalents are hardened sites under or alongside IRGC facilities,” Mohammed added, referring to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and possible locations where Khamenei could be.
As previously reported by Fox News Digital, one of Khamenei’s few recent communications was an X post declaring a “holy war,” framing the geopolitical clash as a mandatory religious obligation.
INSIDE IRAN’S RULING IDEOLOGY: HOW A ‘HOLY MISSION’ AND MESSIANIC DOCTRINE FUEL REGIME EXTREMISM
President Donald Trump said, “I got him before he got me” after Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several top leaders were killed in an Israeli strike in Tehran during the U.S.-Israeli military offensive called Operation Epic Fury. (Majid Saeedi/Getty Images; Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“This is a religious leader calling for sacred war against America and the Jews from an undisclosed location because his enemies have publicly vowed to kill him on sight,” Mohammed said, describing the narrative as “the bin Laden template, almost line for line.”
Mohammed also suggested Khamenei’s retreat into the shadows marks a watershed moment for Washington and the future of the Iranian regime.
His predecessor and father, Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed Feb. 28 in a targeted U.S.-Israeli airstrike in Tehran during Operation Epic Fury.
“This regime that for 47 years projected its power through a single visible Supreme Leader at the Friday prayer pulpit can no longer produce that figure on demand,” he said, calling it a “strategic milestone.”
“Predecessors killed by U.S. strikes and successors who cannot show their faces. Real power exercised by a security apparatus rather than by the nominal figurehead.”
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“Now one side is announcing operations on three continents through its president; the other is governed on paper by a man whose own population is uncertain where he is or what state he is in,” Mohammed said.
“The contrast is also about the optics of leadership during this war,” he added.
World
China ‘won’t win anything’ if it ‘destroys’ Europe’s industry, French minister tells Euronews
France’s Minister for Foreign Trade, Nicolas Forissier, says the European Union must stop being “naive” and shift its mindset when addressing trade imbalances, saying that the approach should encompass all countries weaponising foreign trade.
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