Take his foundation, which he started in 1987 with the purpose of giving away the profits from his book, "The Art of the Deal." But, thanks to the tireless reporting of The Washington Post's David Fahrenthold, we know that in the last 10 years it's become more of a pass-through for other people's gifts, with Trump slapping his name on them. The candidate and his surrogates have claimed that he is a generous philanthropist on the order of tens of millions of dollars, but Fahrenthold has spent months trying to track down any evidence of this with little success (his running Twitter chronicle of his efforts is high entertainment). He found that, per the most recent public records, Trump hasn't given any of his own money to his foundation since 2008 and between then and his becoming the GOP nominee (when high-profile acts of charity became politically beneficial) he seems to have given only one charitable donation from his own pocket to anyone – a gift of less than $10,000 to the Police Athletic League of New York in 2009 (but that "may also be a bookkeeping error").
Trump's foundation hasn't gone dormant: "Since then, all of the donations have been other people's money – an arrangement that experts say is almost unheard of for a family foundation," Fahrenthold reported last weekend. "Trump then takes that money and does with it as he pleases. In many cases, he passes it on to other charities, which often are under the impression that it is Trump's own money." Suckers.
He doesn't give all the money to charity, mind you. He famously bought a six-foot painting of himself and a football autographed by Tim Tebow. And – more to the point for someone who claims expertise in the corrupting ways of modern politics – the foundation gave an especially well-timed $25,000 contribution to a political group connected to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (who had solicited the donation from Trump) when her office was reviewing a case the New York attorney general had brought against the risible Trump University – an investigation the office subsequently elected not to pursue. Not for nothing, a charitable foundation like Trump's can't make political contributions (he's paid a penalty to the IRS over the matter), and team Trump claims that the check coming from there rather than his personal account was the result of a clerical mix-up.
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