It’s been well-known for a while that there’s very little evidence that Donald Trump gives meaningful amounts of money to his own charity (the Donald Trump Foundation) or to other charities despite constantly boasting about how charitable he is. Washington Post gumshoe David Farenthold, though, has now discovered what seems to be a truly innovative act of philanthropy-related chicanery even by Trump’s standards: Using his own foundation’s money (which, to be clear, is overwhelmingly donated by other people) to pay for his own purchase of a $12,000 signed Tim Tebow football helmet at another charity’s auction. From the Post:
Four years ago, at a charity fundraiser in Palm Beach, Donald Trump got into a bidding war at the evening’s live auction. The items up for sale: A Denver Broncos helmet, autographed by then-star quarterback Tim Tebow, and a Tebow jersey.
Trump won, eventually, with a bid of $12,000. Afterward, he posed with the helmet.
Guess where that $12,000 came from, though? Not from Donald Trump’s very real billion-dollar fortune (which is definitely very real and not made of smoke and mirrors and random inflated self-valuations), but from the ol’ Trump Foundation.
Instead, the Susan G. Komen organization – the breast-cancer nonprofit that hosted the party – got a $12,000 payment from another nonprofit , the Donald J. Trump Foundation.
Trump himself sent no money (In fact, a Komen spokesperson said, Trump has never given a personal gift of cash to the Komen organization).
Farenthold interviews experts who confirm that using other people’s charity donations to buy yourself a piece of football memorabilia would be a violation of IRS rules, to say nothing of basic common-sense morality. The experts do note that Trump would be in the clear if he ultimately used the helmet for a charitable purpose, say by re-auctioning it or giving it to a different charity. But his campaign did not furnish the Post with any evidence that he’d done so, and a Palm Beach Post article from the time lists the buyer of the helmet as Donald Trump the person, not the Trump Foundation.
