Empty coffers in the Trump campaign

Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by 6 points in an average of recent national polls, and the numbers are trending in her direction. But recent polls have suggested Trump has the edge on at least one key issue: the economy.

Clinton was no doubt aware of that fact Tuesday when she took aim at Trump in Columbus, Ohio.

“Liberals and conservatives say Trump’s ideas would be disastrous,” Clinton told supporters. “The Chamber of Commerce and labor unions, Mitt Romney, and Elizabeth Warren … economists on the right and the left and the center all agree, Trump would throw us back into recession.”

Trump fired back via Twitter: “Hillary defrauded America as secretary of state. She used it as a personal hedge fund to get herself rich! Corrupt, dangerous, dishonest.”

Trump had his own campaign shakeup to deal with this week with the firing of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, a move that showed dysfunction in a camp that should be flying high after securing the spot as presumptive nominee. Reportedly, in the meeting in which Lewandoski got fired, Trump’s children grilled the campaign manager over why the campaign has no infrastructure and such poor staffing. (At this point, it only has one communications staffer dealing with all the media, national and international.)

Trump’s Federal Elections Commission (FEC) filing this week also revealed some bad news for the candidate. In the month after he became the presumptive nominee, Donald Trump only raised $3.1 million, compared to Hillary Clinton, who raised $27 million. Trump’s cash-on-hand is down to $1.3 million—less than some congressional candidates running for House districts have. Clinton has $42 million.

Additionally, the FEC filing listed $35,000 spent on advertising with Draper-Sterling—a fictional ad agency from the TV show Mad Men. And then about 20 percent of the money from his campaign went to Trump-owned businesses.

The revelations from the FEC filing could undermine Trump’s arguments against the Democratic front runner, particularly because his primary line of attack has focused on corruption. All of that has given rise to a growing movement among some Republicans to try and find a way to dump Trump at the altar next month at the convention.

The good news for Trump is that there’s a long way to go between now and November, and Clinton has problems of her own. She’s facing an FBI investigation and high negatives in her own right, so we’ll see how this plays out.

Listen to “White House Wednesday” on the June 22 edition of The World and Everything in It.