Words matter. These are the best David Fahrenthold Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
During the 2016 election cycle, Trump’s campaign spent at least $791,000 to hold events at 12 Trump-branded venues: three hotels, seven golf courses, a condo building and Mar-a-Lago, federal campaign filings show.
What I found in my research on Trump’s charitable giving was that often he would promise something and then never deliver, but sort of go around with people believing he’d done this thing he’s promised.
The government simply waits for farmers to grow their crops – nine months of growing grapes, then two to three weeks of drying them in the sun. Then it takes away a part of that crop and stores it in warehouses around California.
The U.S. government has a problem with dead people. For one thing, it pays them way too much money.
If your selling access to somebody who is a future president or current secretary of state, or if there’s an implication that you are, that matters.
So much about Trump is… mysterious and slippery. Everything in his business record, you had to ask him for the details. He made himself the only source. He would either not tell you, or he was often an unreliable narrator about his own life.
Even when he was just a reality-TV star, Trump was the kind of star who got a cover story in ‘Time.’ But that wasn’t true. The ‘Time’ cover is a fake. There was no 1 March 2009 issue of ‘Time’ magazine. And there was no issue at all in 2009 that had Trump on the cover.
Trump was on WrestleMania in 2007. And in that year and 2009, the McMahons gave a total of $5 million. Now, we know that wasn’t Trump’s payment for WrestleMania. He got paid separately, but about the same time, they made this $5 million donation.
I personally can barely remember what I was like before I came to college, what made me happy or worried or confident. I don’t remember what I expected in my future, except that ‘President of the United States’ was about halfway up the ladder.
Trump is a really complicated story and a difficult candidate to write about.
The Trump campaign generally does not respond at all to my requests for information – either requests for broader data on Trump’s charitable giving or narrow requests for information about specific subjects, like the $20,000 portrait of himself that Trump seems to have purchased with money from his charity.
The Trump people make it extremely hard to figure out what’s going on with their businesses, so we’ve done things like try to figure out all the people, the charities who rented out ballrooms and hotel rooms, all the NBA teams that stay at his hotels, people that pay him a lot of money and have other choices.
Financial Aid Office (FAO) administrators are scrambling to educate students on repaying loans, but a disparity in knowledge persists.
The expectation with family foundations is that if your name is on the foundation, unless you’re dead, it’s your money that’s being given away. And even if you are dead, it was your money before.
In theory, it is illegal to make the basement into a bureaucratic purgatory. In 1994, for instance, Congress prohibited agencies from making significant changes in a whistleblower’s ‘working conditions’ as punishment for speaking out.
Miami is the place where all great Medicare fraud schemes come from. It has a great concentration of professional criminals and old people.
The Palm Beach Police Foundation is a client of Trump’s. They pay to rent out Mar-a-Lago every year.
There’s two sides to Trump’s character, at least his pre-presidential character. One was, ‘I’m the richest man you could possibly imagine, I live the life of Scrooge McDuck.’ The other side was, ‘I need your money. Give me money.’
I read the collected works of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and made a list of everything the old Baptist preacher had ever condemned as immoral or untoward. The subjects of his condemnation ranged from college-age women going braless to dogs wearing clothes to Beyonce.
In 2007, Donald Trump spent $20,000 that belonged to his charity – the Donald J. Trump Foundation – to buy a six-foot-tall portrait of himself during a fundraiser auction at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida.
Millions of people would give literally anything to get their kids into a school like Harvard, and millions more simple admire it as another, brighter world.
I feel like I understand Trump’s character better than the average person now, having seen all of these little interactions with charity. I wanted to keep doing something that’s like that, and not just doing pure politics. So my piece of the Trump empire is the golf courses, Mar-a-Lago, and the winery.
Trump and his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, have both been criticized during their campaigns for activities related to their foundations.
Donald Trump was in a tuxedo, standing next to his award: a statue of a palm tree, as tall as a toddler. It was 2010, and Trump was being honored by a charity – the Palm Beach Police Foundation – for his ‘selfless support’ of its cause. His support did not include any of his own money.
If you have $1 billion, you can use the Clinton Foundation as a conduit, and as it goes by, Clinton gives it his prestige.
The point of my stories was not to defeat Trump. The point was to tell readers the facts about this man running for president. How reliable was he at keeping promises? How much moral responsibility did he feel to help those less fortunate than he? By the end of the election, I felt I’d done my job.
I started covering Trump’s charitable giving sort of by accident.
A lot of other wealthy people feel the responsibility to take some of the wealth they’ve been given and give back: to give a lot of money to a particular cancer charity or to a group researching some particular disease or their alma mater. We haven’t really found anything like that with Trump.
I started at ‘The Post’ as an intern in 2000 right after I got out of college.
Federal election laws bar candidates from the ‘personal use’ of campaign donations – a ban meant to stop candidates from buying things unrelated to their runs for office. If a purchase is a result of campaign activity, the government allows it.
Nonprofits such as the Trump Foundation are prohibited from giving political gifts.
Don’t focus on what Trump says. Focus on the results of his actions. Stay in your lane and focus on one particular area.
Marty Baron, ‘The Post’s executive editor, stopped me in the elevator lobby late one debate night and suggested we look into the Trump Foundation specifically. I also became interested in researching Trump’s broader history of charity.
So many rich people, when they get into philanthropy, they have one thing they like, or several things they focus on. They pick a disease or a college or some kind of non-profit. They produce good results through that cause, but also they get recognized; there’s some sort of monument to what they did.
Some courts have said moving an employee to a basement or closet usually amounts to punishment. But others have said this is a decision that should be made case by case. How nice is the basement office? How big is the closet?
For years, Trump himself was the Trump Foundation’s only source of money: Between 1987 and 2006, he donated $5.4 million.
Many graduates, moving often in the first years of their post-college life, simply forget to update their addresses with Harvard, and so bills go unanswered and uncollected. This is called a ‘technical default.’
The federal government requires that its loans be paid back within 10 years of graduation, and Harvard has pegged its loans to the same 10-year timetable. Yet despite Harvard’s low default rate, the idea of years of loan debt is daunting for some students even before it’s time to pay back.
The national raisin reserve is real.
What’s a good metaphor for a Harvard student? A talking, gold-plated pile of manure, wearing a fleece.
Trump has a lot of contacts in the world of charity because he rents out ballrooms, hotel ballrooms, the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago to charities. Charities are often the ones that rent out these ballrooms for big events.
In the past, whistleblowers have had their desks moved to break rooms, broom closets, and basements. It’s a clever punishment, good-government activists say, that exploits a gray area in the law. The whole thing can look minor on paper. They moved your office. So what?
Once money goes into a charity, it is tax exempt, so that’s a benefit you get. And in return, you have to use the assets of the charity to serve the public good. So if Trump is using this money basically to save his businesses, the money isn’t helping people. That’s a violation of the letter and the spirit of law.
When bills come in, Medicare get so many bills every day, it pays most of them and then goes back later to figure out if they were fraudulent, if it ever goes back at all.
