First up is that we finally have an example of that voter fraud that Trump keeps whining about. And of course the perpetrator voted twice for (who else) Donald Trump. What’s also interesting is that this case (and two others, also both trying to benefit Trump) were caught almost immediately (showing that actual voter fraud is very difficult to get away with) and are reportedly the first cases of voter fraud found in Iowa in 12 years (showing that it is very rare).
But the big story is a new report by David Fahrenthold, who is quickly showing up most of the media by making it look easy to be a real investigative reporter. Fahrenthold’s new report looks into Donald Trump’s charitable giving, and finds that there virtually isn’t any there there. That’s right, Trump’s “foundation” is a sham.
Indeed, the largest donation ever made by the Trump “foundation” was $264,631 to fix a fountain outside one of Trump’s own hotels.
But my favorite example is when Donald Trump crashed a charity event unannounced. I just have to quote the whole story, it is so unbelievably outrageous:
In the fall of 1996, a charity called the Association to Benefit Children held a ribbon-cutting in Manhattan for a new nursery school serving children with AIDS. The bold-faced names took seats up front.
There was then-Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) and former mayor David Dinkins (D). TV stars Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford, who were major donors. And there was a seat saved for Steven Fisher, a developer who had given generously to build the nursery.
Then, all of a sudden, there was Donald Trump.
“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.
But now he was sitting in Fisher’s seat, next to Giuliani.
“Frank Gifford turned to me and said, ‘Why is he here?’ ” Buchenholz recalled recently. By then, the ceremony had begun. There was nothing to do.
“Just sing past it,” she recalled Gifford telling her.
So they warbled into the first song on the program, “This Little Light of Mine,” alongside Trump and a chorus of children — with a photographer snapping photos, and Trump looking for all the world like an honored donor to the cause.
Afterward, Disney and Buchenholz recalled, Trump left without offering an explanation. Or a donation. Fisher was stuck in the audience. The charity spent months trying to repair its relationship with him.
“I mean, what’s wrong with you, man?” Disney recalled thinking of Trump, when it was over.
