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Reality-challenged billionaire Donald Trump has long claimed to be a paragon of philanthropy, allegedly donating more than $100 million over the last half decade alone. “I give to hundreds of charities and people in need of help,” Trump told the Associated Press last year. “It is one of the things I most like doing and one the great reasons to have made a lot of money.” Those claims have been repeatedly cast into doubt, to put it mildly. Publicly available records for the Trump Foundation show that the real estate mogul has donated very little of his own money to his charity. Even more damning is the fact that few of those donations have gone to legitimate charitable causes, unless you count Trump’s own social interests and society galas as charities.
According to an unofficial audit by The Washington Post, which dug through the records of 167 charities to which Trump had pledged money since 2008, only one donation was actually on the books: a gift to the Police Athletic League of New York City, made in 2009, for somewhere between $5,000 and $9,999. The other millions that Trump said he would donate apparently never materialized.
Promising money and then not following through isn’t new for Trump. Between 1987 and 1991, the Post found that the Trump Foundation only ever gave $137,000 of the $1.9 million that was pledged to causes such as AIDS research, veterans, and homeless organizations—about 7 percent of what was promised. The remaining 93 percent went to groups that the Post characterized as “society galas, his high school, his college, a foundation for indigent real estate brokers.” A ballet school Ivanka Trump attended received $16,750, while Eric Trump's private high school received $40,000—“more than the homeless, AIDS and multiple sclerosis contributions combined.”
It’s unclear where all the money Trump has said he would donate actually goes. Earlier this month, Buzzfeed reported that the fees Trump received for consulting and public events did not appear to have been dispersed. In one instance in 1988, he charged boxer Mike Tyson $2 million to be an adviser for Tyson’s business ventures. “Anything I make from this position will go to charities fighting AIDS, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, and helping the homeless,” he said at the time, promising to donate it to his foundation. That money never appeared in the Trump Foundation’s records.
The Trump campaign’s defense has long been that Trump doesn’t make the donations just through his foundation, but rather he makes them personally. This, it must be said, is a remarkably clever response. The only way to determine exactly how much the billionaire has donated himself is by analyzing his tax filings, which Trump has, coincidentally, refused to release. “He makes contributions personally and there’s no way for you to know or understand what those gifts are or when they are made,“ his campaign spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, told Buzzfeed. “We appreciate your interest in his charitable giving, which is generous and frequent.”
(VANITY FAIR)
