Political Irony

Some people might argue that the Trump University scandal is old news. That Donald Trump did that back when he was a businessman, so it was ok to swindle people out of their money for his own enrichment. But if he becomes president, he will be our scumbag swindler, using his evil powers to make America great again (whatever the hell that means).

And yet, even now, Trump continues to con people. Remember when he decided to skip one of the Republican debates because Fox News had been mean to him? He held a “fund raiser for veterans” instead, which he claimed had raised $6 million dollars. Then the Washington Post checked into it, and found that far less had actually been disbursed to veterans groups.

So caught lying by the media, Trump did what he always does — he demonized the messenger and called them names. But as Trump had made support for veterans a cornerstone of his campaign, he was caught red handed, so he was forced to make good on his lie.

And for good measure, he had to come up with another lie. He claimed that they hadn’t disbursed the money because they had to vet all the veterans groups before they could give them money. Really? I would think that most large charities are pretty well known by now. But Trump insisted, saying “You have to go through a process. When you send checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars to people and to companies and to groups that you’ve never heard of, charitable organizations, you have to vet it. You send people out, you do a lot of work.”

But here’s the best part. Let’s assume that Trump was not lying, and that his people (you know, the best people) were working very hard vetting these groups. Who did they come up with?

Well, it turns out that at least one of the veteran’s groups that received money from Trump is itself a sham. The “Foundation for American Veterans” has an “F” (fail) rating from CharityWatch.

Why? Because that supposed charity spent only a small fraction of its budget, you know, actually helping veterans. The rest went to executive salaries, fundraising, and a quarter of their entire budget was spent on “other expenses”. For all we know, that money was used to pay off people. (Wouldn’t it be great to find out that Trump used the veteran’s money to pay off the three people he got to say nice things about Trump University?)

What’s more, the Better Business Bureau issued an alert just this year against the charity, because of a “high volume of complaints and customer reviews”, and charges that people received “harassing phone calls” from them. As Trump might say, “real beauties”.

That’s what veterans get when Trump carefully vets charities for them: Used as political pawns and then screwed.