A few months ago, shortly after Donald Trump filed a radical (and by any fair measure, frivolous) $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, he told reporters that he assumed “nobody would care” if he struck a deal with his own administration because he and his team were “thinking about doing something for charity.”
The president’s comments now appear absurd. Instead of securing funds for charitable purposes, the Republican reached an agreement with his own administration for $1.776 billion in taxpayer funds that will be directed to the White House’s political allies, as part of a corrupt gambit that has been widely panned as an unprecedented slush fund.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday morning, Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island reminded acting Attorney General Todd Blanche about the president’s stated commitment to use these funds for charitable purposes and asked Blanche whether he would follow through on what Trump said he wanted.
“I’m aware that he said that,” the Republican lawyer replied, “but that’s not ultimately what the settlement calls for.”
Yeah, we’ve noticed.
Blanche’s clumsy answer was unfortunate, not just for its use of passive voice, and not just for its emphasis on the word “settlement,” since there was no actual legal settlement in this instance: Trump withdrew a baseless case he was likely to lose, and his team decided to create a pool of money for his allies worth nearly $1.8 billion in public funds.
Making matters worse, however, was the familiarity of the circumstances. During Trump’s 2016 campaign, he routinely boasted that he had given more than $102 million to charity in the previous five years. The Washington Post, however, took a closer look and found, “Not a single one of those donations was actually a personal gift of Trump’s own money.”
Rather, the future president relied on the Trump Foundation, which he ultimately had to shut down because of its misuse of funds.
Also during the 2016 race, Trump boasted about having raised $6 million for veterans charities. We learned soon after that this total wasn’t quite right, either.
With a track record like this one, MS NOW’s Jen Psaki recently offered some advice for what to do the next time the president talks about his intention to donate to charity: “Don’t listen to him.”
The post On charitable donations, Trump adds to his long list of broken promises appeared first on MS NOW.
