“Let me put it this way: I think you’ll be happy, and I think that a lot of our friends will be very happy. But I’m not actually allowed to answer it,” Mr. Trump said then. “It makes it very difficult if I do.”
Nothing legally bars Mr. Trump from declaring he is running for president. But he would be subject to additional fund-raising limits and disclosure requirements if he did so.
Once a politician has decided to run for federal office and begun fund-raising, the person is supposed to file paperwork declaring the candidacy. There is also an interim step for those who are “testing the waters” of a run.
The American Bridge complaint says Mr. Trump has crossed both thresholds, though the line is notoriously blurry.
For now, Mr. Trump’s main PAC, called Save America, is registered as a committee that can spend on behalf of others, and the PAC did give away $350,000 to other candidates in 2021, though that sum is far less than the amount the PAC has spent on Mr. Trump’s own properties.
The complaint would appear unlikely to generate any crackdown by the Federal Election Commission, which is equally divided between commissioners aligned with the Democratic and Republican parties, and often deadlocks on contentious matters. The watchdog agency’s investigations process is also notoriously slow. A complaint to the commission related to the pre-candidacy activities of Jeb Bush, who announced his run for president in 2015, was still in court as recently as December 2021.