“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.
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For as long as he has been rich and famous, Donald Trump has also wanted people to believe he is generous. He spent years constructing an image as a philanthropist by appearing at charity events and by making very public — even nationally televised — promises to give his own money away.
It was, in large part, a facade. A months-long investigation by The Washington Post has not been able to verify many of Trump’s boasts about his philanthropy.
Instead, throughout his life in the spotlight, whether as a businessman, television star or presidential candidate, The Post found that Trump had sought credit for charity he had not given — or had claimed other people’s giving as his own.
Trump promised to give away the proceeds of Trump University. He promised to donate the salary he earned from %u201CThe Apprentice.%u201D He promised to give personal donations to the charities chosen by contestants on %u201CCelebrity Apprentice.%u201D He promised to donate $250,000 to a charity helping Israeli soldiers and veterans.
Together, those pledges would have increased Trump%u2019s lifetime giving by millions of dollars. But The Post has been unable to verify that he followed through on any of them.
For months, The Washington Post has been looking for evidence to back up a key claim Donald Trump makes about himself: that, in recent years, he has given millions of dollars to charity out of his own pocket. There is no evidence of that in the files of Trump's nonprofit, the Donald J. Trump Foundation. And Trump has not released his tax returns, which would detail his recent charitable giving.
In an effort to find proof of Trump's personal giving, The Post has contacted more than 400 charities with some ties to the GOP nominee. Some got money from the Trump Foundation (). In other cases, Trump had a personal connection () to the charity or its leaders . Some were charities that DonorSearch database records () indicated he might have given to. A variety of other reasons () included media mentions, gala attendance, or involvement with Trump's TV show "Celebrity Apprentice."
So far, The Post's search has turned up little. Between 2008 and this May — when Trump made good on a pledge to give $1 million to a veterans' group — its search has identified just one personal gift from Trump's own pocket.