David Fahrenthold just posted a new article for the Washington Post here: wapo.st/…
In it, he details just how much boasting Trump does about charity, and how little — how very little — he and his organization really contribute to non-profit organizations.
But even worse than that — the article details how Trump leeches onto non-profit events he has no involvement in, and is — blatantly — a phony philanthropist. Here’s one example from the article that is so brazen it’s mind-blowing:
In the fall of 1996, a charity called the Association to Benefit Children held a ribbon-cutting in Manhattan for a new nursery school serving children with AIDS. The bold-faced names took seats up front.
There was then-Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) and former mayor David Dinkins (D). TV stars Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford, who were major donors. And there was a seat saved for Steven Fisher, a developer who had given generously to build the nursery.
Then, all of a sudden, there was Donald Trump.
“Nobody knew he was coming,” said Abigail Disney, another donor sitting on the dais. “There’s this kind of ruckus at the door, and I don’t know what was going on, and in comes Donald Trump. [He] just gets up on the podium and sits down.”
Trump was not a major donor. He was not a donor, period. He’d never given a dollar to the nursery or the Association to Benefit Children, according to Gretchen Buchenholz, the charity’s executive director then and now.
But now he was sitting in Fisher’s seat, next to Giuliani.
“Frank Gifford turned to me and said, ‘Why is he here?’ ” Buchenholz recalled recently. By then, the ceremony had begun. There was nothing to do.
And then there’s the Trump Foundation. Just check out what WAPO was able to find out about his contributions through that front:
New findings, for instance, show that the Trump Foundation’s largest-ever gift — $264,631 — was used to renovate a fountain outside the windows of Trump’s Plaza Hotel.
Its smallest-ever gift, for $7, was paid to the Boy Scouts in 1989, at a time when it cost $7 to register a new Scout. Trump’s oldest son was 11 at the time. Trump did not respond to a question about whether the money paid to register him.
Another part of the story is how he rents his venues to charities all the time, and never donates the space (which is fairly typical).
So Donald Trump actually profits from non-profit organizations: Completely. Just read the whole thing. There are numerous potential bombshells, including his giving to a clearly phony museum in what used to be a mafia office:
The best illustration of that was the charity to which the foundation gave its two largest gifts of the 1990s. The Trump Foundation gave $50,000 in 1995, and another $50,000 in 1999, to a nonprofit called the National Museum of Catholic Art and History.
Those gifts, not previously reported, seemed like an odd choice for big charitable dollars.
The museum was housed for much of the 1990s in a former headquarters for “Fat Tony” Salerno of the Genovese crime family in East Harlem. It had few visitors and little art. A Village Voice reporter, visiting in 2001, said the collection included a photo of the pope, some nun dolls bought from the Home Shopping Network, and — just off the dining room — “a black Jacuzzi decorated with simmering candles, gold-plated soap dishes, and kitsch angel figurines.”
Trump is not Catholic.
Trump is a mobster. And he uses charitable giving as a front, for both PR and money-laundering.
If any system is rigged, it’s his own personal one. Lock HIM up.