As President Trump ramps up his campaign to get back in the White House, his fundraising is off to a slow start — another sign that his 2024 efforts may look more like his 2016 run rather than 2020.

Those familiar with the president’s fundraising said his political operation raised $9.5 million in the six weeks between his campaign announcement in November and the end of the year, NBC reported Tuesday. New filings with the Federal Elections Commission, though, show that only about $3.8 million of this flowed through his principal campaign committee.

Even though this was a lackluster showing, a spokesman for the former president, Steve Cheung, said Mr. Trump’s fundraising apparatus is “second to none.”

“The president will wage an aggressive and fully funded campaign to take our country back from Joe Biden and Democrats who seek to destroy our country,” Mr. Cheung said in a statement.

Funds were mostly raised through committees controlled by the president’s allies, such as the Make America Great Again PAC and the Trump Save America Joint Fundraising Committee.

A professor of political science at John Jay College, Brian Arbour told the Sun that the fundraising slowdown is a sign that Mr. Trump is not as strong as he once was. “Because it’s not a great number, it’s another sign of his vulnerability and it’s another sign — because he gets so much of his donations from small and midsize donors — that his vulnerability is not only among political elites,” he said.

The fundraising data show that Mr. Trump is not a “monolith” in the GOP, Mr. Arbour said, though he retains a number of advantages that make him a formidable candidate.

“He had the best rhetorical strategy in 2016,” Mr. Arbour said. “I don’t see any reason why he doesn’t retain that advantage, and that’s a big one for him.”

In his 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump raised $1.9 million in the first month of fundraising and $3.9 million by the end of the second month. Most of his 2016 campaign was funded by small donors.

During his 2020 campaign, on the other hand, Mr. Trump did not need to compete in a primary, so his fundraising machine soaked up most of the donations on the Republican side, both small and large.

This meant that the composition of his donor base was dramatically different, with the campaign finance tracker Open Secrets finding that large donors gave the majority of funds — 51.2 percent — to his 2020 campaign.

Another key difference is the sort of coverage that Mr. Trump received from the press, with Open Secrets valuing it at $5 billion in 2016.

Although the latest fundraising data for Mr. Trump do represent a slowdown — in the six weeks prior to his announcement he raised $11.8 million — there is reason to believe it will tick back up. The latest numbers come from a normally slow post-election period for campaign fundraising, and one in which Mr. Trump was facing increased scrutiny because of a poor Republican performance in the 2022 midterms.

Mr. Trump and his campaign do have a strategy to ramp up fundraising. He is planning to return to Twitter and Facebook after about a two-year absence, which will likely help fill his campaign’s coffers.

The return to mainstream social media would be a big step for getting Mr. Trump’s message in front of potential donors. The Center for Campaign Innovation reports that 46 percent and 18 percent of Republican donors use Facebook and Twitter, respectively, every day.

About 18 percent of donors use the president’s own social media platform, Truth Social, daily. The campaign also plans to launch a mail fundraising campaign in the near future.

Although Mr. Trump’s immediate post-announcement fundraising numbers were slow, and large donors have yet to weigh in on the race in earnest, he still wins the plurality in most GOP presidential primary polls.

The latest of these, a Morning Consult survey conducted between January 17 and 29, found that Mr. Trump enjoyed the support of 48 percent of Republican primary voters. He was followed by Governor DeSantis, with 31 percent support.