Top 82 Quotes & Sayings by David Fahrenthold
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American journalist David Fahrenthold.
Last updated on November 8, 2024.
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.
If someone shut down Twitter tomorrow, and Trump had to get started on some other platform, he'd never do it. And I think the whole country would be different.
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.
I started covering Trump's charitable giving sort of by accident.
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.
We are in the era when I go home and have dinner with my kids and put them to bed, and hours later I go to Twitter, and the world has changed.
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.
You need a lot of money to become president.
The perception a lot of folks have of the Clintons, even folks who are Democrats, see the Clintons as bending the rules.
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.
Since Trump began running for president in summer 2015, he has repeatedly used his hotels and golf courses as venues for his campaign events - and paid himself for the privilege.
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.
The biggest correlation you find is with Trump's own personal and business interests. He lives in Palm Beach part of the year, where charity galas are a big part of the life. And he runs a club in Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, that depends a lot on being rented out by charities, who can pay as much as $275,000 per night to rent out his club.
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.
IRS rules generally prohibit acts of 'self-dealing,' in which a charity's leaders use the nonprofit group's money to buy things for themselves.
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.
There are two main organizations that rate charities. They look at their finances and decide whether they are giving enough to the causes they claim to focus on. Something like 80 or 90% of their money actually goes to a charitable purpose.
For me, the thing that is different about Trump is that you don't realize it, and I didn't realize it, but there is a rhythm that the political press - including myself - expects people to show in terms of embarrassing statements or shameful acts. And that is spinning it away and finally being forced to apologize, and then apologize again.
Trump started his foundation in 1987 to give away the proceeds from his book 'The Art of the Deal.' It has no paid employees and a board of five: Trump, three of his children, and a longtime Trump Organization employee. They all work a half-hour per week, according to the foundation's most recent Internal Revenue Service filing.
Trump is somebody who sees the media as basically his main constituency. So much of his self-worth and his image and his view of what the presidency should be about is the media and how he is reflected in the media.
The U.S. government has a problem with dead people. For one thing, it pays them way too much money.
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.
Don't focus on what Trump says. Focus on the results of his actions. Stay in your lane and focus on one particular area.
All of philanthropy is harnessing that urge to have your name on something, and using it for good.
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.
Trump and his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, have both been criticized during their campaigns for activities related to their foundations.
In five cases, the Trump Foundation told the IRS that it had given a gift to a charity whose leaders told 'The Post' that they had never received it. In two other cases, companies listed as donors to the Trump Foundation told 'The Post' that those listings were incorrect.
There are some things about Trump's foundation and charity that I really want to know. I worry there may not be enough time to figure it all out.
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.
I started at 'The Post' as an intern in 2000 right after I got out of college.
The federal helium program sells vast amounts of the gas to U.S. companies that use it in everything from party balloons to MRI machines. If the government stops, no one else is ready.
You know how country music stars get an extra 10 years on their life when they go to Branson? Like you're washed up, and you go to Branson, then you can last another 10 years. That's what bashing the media does.
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.
Trump is a really complicated story and a difficult candidate to write about.
The Palm Beach Police Foundation is a client of Trump's. They pay to rent out Mar-a-Lago every year.
In a given year, the government may decide that farmers are growing more raisins than Americans will want to eat. That would cause supply to outstrip demand. Raisin prices would drop. And raisin farmers might go out of business.
In 1996, Trump had crashed a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a charity opening a nursery school for children with AIDS. Trump, who had never donated to the charity, stole a seat onstage that had been saved for a big contributor.
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.
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.
Because of a jury-rigged and outdated system meant to track deaths, the government has trouble determining exactly which Americans are deceased.
I am not going to argue about whether I am a nasty guy.
If you have Trump avoiding income tax and money coming in, and then he's still able to control it and use it as if it was his income to help his interests, then you're starting to see a bigger legal problem.
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.
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.
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.
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 Post' is a fairly fusty place when it comes to profanity. If a reporter tries to get a bad word into a story, the word is usually forwarded to top editors, who consider it with the gravity and speed that the Vatican applies to candidates for sainthood.
For years, Trump himself was the Trump Foundation's only source of money: Between 1987 and 2006, he donated $5.4 million.
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?
The national raisin reserve is real.
We learned that Trump had not given a million dollars away. When Corey Lewandowski told me that, it was a lie.
I used to cover the environment, and it does have the advantage of the fact that when you call people up and ask them questions, their first instinct is not to lie to you.
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.
You could be a corrupt doctor, but at least you have to go to the medical school first. Right?
Nonprofits such as the Trump Foundation are prohibited from giving political gifts.
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?
Trump has made claims about himself - about his charitable giving, his business success, even the size of the crowd at his inauguration - that are not supported by the facts.
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.
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