The Trump campaign is starting to be asked about all the donations that Donald Trump has been so quick to talk about in interviews and “reality shows,” but which have been so hard to find in real reality. Trump loves to make promises, but it seems he often fails to follow through.
In May, under pressure from the news media, Donald Trump made good on a pledge he made four months earlier: He gave $1 million to a nonprofit group helping veterans’ families.
Before that, however, when was the last time that Trump had given any of his own money to a charity?
The answer seems to be: Not recently, and even in the distant past, not often. Trump apparently cut another check for $100k related to his very public trip to Louisiana during the floods, but before that there’s no evidence that he put out a dime of his own money since 2008. Only … his campaign says that's not true.
A spokeswoman for Donald Trump's presidential campaign, seeking to rebut criticism of the GOP nominee's history of charitable giving, said that Trump has given away "tens of millions of dollars" over his life.
That’s fantastic. Really. For someone who claims to be worth $10 Billion, even $10 million would be only 0.1 percent of their worth, so it seems like the least that Trump could do. Seriously, the least.
But spokeswoman Hope Hicks offered no details about that number, beyond saying that it included donations from the Donald J. Trump Foundation -- a charity that, despite its name, has been filled almost entirely with other people's money in recent years.
Trump’s talk-big, do-little when it comes to charity has been a lifetime habit.
In the 1980s, Trump pledged to give away royalties from his first book to fight AIDS and multiple sclerosis. But he gave less to those causes than he did to his older daughter’s ballet school.
And while Trump likes to talk about giving away money to veterans and for medical research into AIDS and other illnesses, the truth is that he tended to give token donations to those causes—$1,000 or less—and reserve larger checks for the things he actually held dear.
Much of the rest went to charities tied to Trump’s life: society galas, his high school, his college, a foundation for indigent real estate brokers. The School of American Ballet, where Ivanka Trump studied from 1989 to 1991, got $16,750.
A private school that educated Trump’s son Eric got $40,000 — more than the homeless and AIDS contributions combined.
How does Donald Trump rack up against some genuinely generous Americans?
Bill Gates is worth almost five times as much as Trump’s claimed $10 billion net, but Gates has given away $28 billion—more than half his wealth, compared to Trump’s unproven claim of giving up a tenth of one-percent.
Warren Buffet has donated over $17 billion, along with signing a pledge to donate at least half his wealth.
George Soros—that guy the right loves to hate—has wealth about twice that claimed by Trump, and yet he’s given away almost $8 billion.
Even if he has given away “tens of millions,” that’s still a tiny, tiny portion of Trump’s professed wealth. When Trump’s campaign claims he’s given away $10 million, they’re saying he’s donated 1 / 1000th as much as other men who supposedly have the same kind of wealth that he does.
And even so, there’s no evidence that Trump really has given away the money that he claims. Instead, the record is filled with instances in which Trump promised to give away funds that never arrived, or even claimed to have already given funds, that no one could locate.
But Trump does have an explanation.
Trump’s representatives have repeatedly said that there have been many charitable donations from Trump in recent years but that he has purposely kept them under wraps.
“We want to keep them private. We want to keep them quiet,” Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of Trump’s business, told The Post earlier this year. “He doesn’t want other charities to see it. Then it becomes like a feeding frenzy.”
Like a “feeding frenzy?” So, Trump is only pretending to be Scrooge McDonald so no one will ask him for money? Except he attends lots of charity galas where he takes credit for money donated to his foundation by other people. Pretending to be generous doesn’t seem to bother Trump. It’s letting the moths out of his wallet that seems to be his problem.
Sure. That makes sense. Just like getting someone fired shows that his trip to Mexico was a great success.
David Fahrenthold at the Washington Post, who has been following up Trump’s charitable donations, and the lack there-of, posted a challenge to his campaign’s claims that Trump has been secretly generous.