“It’s called other people’s money. There’s nothing like doing things with other people’s money. Because it takes the risk, you get a good chunk of it and it takes the risk.”
That was Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in North Carolina on Tuesday talking about how other countries should pay to aid refugees in the Middle East. But he might as well have been talking about the Trump Foundation — or perhaps more accurately, the “Foundation,” considering the news coming out about it.
As the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold — who has been consistently digging up stories on the various misdeeds of Trump’s supposed charity organization — found this week, the Trump Foundation paid some $258,000 to settle lawsuits levied against Trump and his private businesses.
The key thing to know, though, is that Trump himself hasn’t donated any of his own money to the foundation in years; he raises funds from others and then simply takes credit when the foundation doles it out. As U.S. News’ Robert Schlesinger put it, Trump is “playing philanthropist with other people’s money.”
So here’s how Trump’s legal ju-jitsu worked: He would agree to provide charitable donations as a way to end lawsuits, making it sound like he would be paying out of his own pocket. But then he would turn around and use funds donated to the foundation. Money ostensibly collected from donors for charity was therefore paid out to settle his own business affairs.
Like so many other Trump ventures, then — be they Trump University, Trump Mortgage or Trump Network (a vitamin marketing scheme) — the Trump Foundation has more than the whiff of a scam. “I’ve never encountered anything so brazen,” one attorney told the Post.
For those who perhaps haven’t been hanging on every turn of this tale, this isn’t the first instance of the foundation behaving badly. In addition to Trump using foundation funds to buy portraits of himself ( seriously) and a Tim Tebow football helmet ( ugh), he also used the foundation to donate to a political action committee supporting Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, a transgression for which he paid a fine to the IRS.
And Trump’s team has been unable to challenge the facts of the case to this point, preferring to dissemble or go into media attack mode, a tried and true approach for conservatives who don’t have a leg to stand on. (Meanwhile, the namesake foundation of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, has received the lion’s share of the attention during the 2016 campaign, because it got asked for favors that it didn’t provide, or something.)
Perhaps more importantly, though, nothing about the Trump Foundation’s modus operandi dispels the notion that Trump is running for president for fun and profit, as a way to enrich himself and his family via his political power. As I wrote last week, in addition to already explicitly explaining how he’d profit off the presidency, Trump’s plan to avoid conflicts of interest with his businesses were he to win — of which there will be many, many, many — is laughable, and requires us to quite literally engage in some ” blind trust.”
There’s simply no way to determine, due to Trump’s lack of transparency as far as his businesses are concerned, what sort of entanglements he has with unsavory characters the world over that would be affected by his holding the reins of American foreign policy. On the domestic front, there are plenty of ways he could use the levers of power to benefit himself, as well; and his tax plan, which Speaker Paul Ryan is surely enthusiastic to pass, would provide supposedly wealthy folks like him with a gigantic tax cut — assuming he pays any income taxes at the moment, which isn’t a given. Trump has even used his time on the campaign trail as a way to profit and to sucker cable news into running infomercials for new Trump ventures. The cherry on top is that he literally used a charity funded by other people to help himself out of legal jams.
It’s called other people’s money, Trump says. So what will he do when that money is the taxpayers’?
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Donald J. Trump Foundation Scam Pays With Other People’s Money originally appeared on usnews.com
