Trump’s Lie About Charity Donations Destroyed As He Hasn’t Donated To His Foundation Since 2008

“Trump in Dec. 2016: ‘I gave millions of dollars to DJT Foundation’ Per @nytimes: ‘Mr. Trump did not donate to his foundation in 2016 and has not done so since 2008.'” former Deputy Secretary of Labor and White House Cabinet Secretary Chris Lu pointed out above a New York Times article on the Trump Foundation.

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The New York Times threw down some actual facts on the alternative facts President Trump tried to sell regarding his charitable giving.

In December of 2016, Trump claimed he had donated millions to his foundation and that all of the money raised went to “wonderful charities.” This was after he got busted for inaccurately claiming to have donated a hundred million to charity.

But:

“Mr. Trump did not donate to his foundation in 2016 and has not done so since 2008,” the New York Times reported.

Okay, wait. Follow this lie because it was used to back up another lie.

On the campaign trail, Trump claimed that he gave more than $102 million to charity over the past five years.

However, in April of 2016 David Fahrenthold and Rosalind Helderman of the Washington Post couldn’t find a single personal cash donation to charity.

In reaction, the Trump campaign (R-Russia, it seems) responded by claiming he has provided millions to his own foundation. “He has provided millions of dollars to fund his Foundation and a multitude of other charitable causes.”

But now we know Trump hasn’t donated to his own foundation since 2008.

How about before that? In September, the New Yorker took apart this claim summarizing previously reported disparities:

“In April, 2011, when he was again thinking about running for President, the Smoking Gun took another gander at the I.R.S. returns from the Trump Foundation. This time, the Web site examined the entire period from 1990 to 2009. Over those twenty years, it reported, Trump had “donated a total of just $3.7 million to his foundation.” That figure confirms Trump’s claim that he has given “millions” away, but it hardly amounts to “many millions,” “millions and millions and millions,” or a hundred and two million. For the period from 1990 to 2009, his annual donations to his foundation averaged $185,000 a year.

How did Trump react to being outed? With his trademark tantrum: The Twitter rant accompanied by a misspelling:

Of course we already knew when he tweeted that “all of which” didn’t go to charity. It bought a football helmet and paid people off and bought a painting of Trump.

So that’s a “no” to millions and millions, a no to personally donating to his foundation since 2008 and before that, it was an average of $185,000 a year from 1990-2009. We are nowhere near $102 million.

It has been established, instead, that Donald Trump is unable to accurately account for his own actions and is prone to wildly distorting the facts to suit a grandiose vision of himself. Trump is, however, adept at taking credit for donations he managed to get other people to provide.

Imagine if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama had misrepresented the facts to this degree. During Obama’s presidency, the right flipped out over single words that they felt were inaccurate and here Donald Trump isn’t just getting a few words wrong or spinning the truth for partisan purposes, he’s taking a paltry few million since 1990 and stretching it to “$102 million dollars.”

The truth still matters.

Sarah Jones

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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.

Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.

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