The Making of Donald Trump (15 page)

Meanwhile, Trump was embroiled in new problems he’d created for himself and his foundation, problems that put a number of charities helping military veterans at risk of losing their tax-exempt status.

L
iberty House, a small veterans charity in New Hampshire, received a call from the Trump campaign on February 5, 2016, the day before the first primary vote in the nation for the 2016 election. Keith Howard, an Army veteran who runs the charity, said he was asked to come to a Trump rally in Londonderry on Monday, the night before the vote, to accept a $100,000 donation from Trump.

Howard declined. It was not that his veterans support group could not use the money, which was equal to a third of their annual budget. And it was not that they disliked Trump or preferred another candidate, either. Howard declined because it is illegal for charities to participate in partisan politics.

“
I told them it would endanger our status as a charitable organization,” Howard told me. “I said we couldn’t do it.”

He was right, but while he passed on the opportunity to lend his charity’s name in support of Trump, others did not. The campaign continued to engage charities in ways that
helped Trump but that jeopardized the organizations’ ability to receive tax-deductible donations, which are strictly regulated by Congress.

Eventually Liberty House did get the promised money, which came not from Trump but from a wealthy resident of Trump Tower.

During another campaign event in Iowa, less than two weeks before the call to Keith Howard, Trump announced a drive to “raise some money for the vets.” Trump and his campaign said more than $6 million was raised on the spot, but when journalists from a number of organizations asked which veterans groups could expect to benefit from the fund-raiser, they received no answers.

Four months passed with no evidence that any money had been distributed. Just before
The Washington Post
ran a story about where the money had (or hadn’t) gone, Trump had checks sent to veterans groups by overnight delivery. A few days later, he announced he had turned over $5.6 million, including $1 million of his own money, to veterans, and his campaign handed out a list of the recipients.

Trump used the questions about the distributions to lambaste journalists generally, and called one reporter a sleaze.

“
The press should be ashamed of themselves,” Trump said. Instead of being showered with unqualified praise, Trump complained, he was asked for evidence that the donated money was actually going to veterans charities. He was also asked why the amount raised was about a million and a half less than the $6 million campaign manager Corey Lewandowski had quoted at the time. The response was that not everyone fulfilled his or her pledges, an interesting answer since a charitable pledge is a legally enforceable obligation if made in writing, and it is standard practice for charities to get pledges in writing.

Journalists had good reason to ask where the charity dollars were, given Trump’s long history of promising donations and no public record of them actually being made.

For example, Donald Trump often boasts about his education at the University of Pennsylvania. But despite his penchant for putting his name on buildings and flaunting what he says is his immense wealth, there are no buildings bearing the Trump name on the Philadelphia campus. There are no lecture halls, no classrooms, no line of books on a library shelf, not even a chair with the Trump name. His name does not even appear in annual listings of donors that Penn, like nearly all colleges, publishes in brochures and other materials sent to graduates and supporters.

Of course it could be, as Trump himself has said, that he prefers to make donations privately, without his name attached.

When
The Art of the Deal
was published in 1987, Trump publicly promised that all royalties would go to help the homeless, Vietnam veterans, and people with AIDS and multiple sclerosis. The book sold so well—it was a number one
New York Times
bestseller—that Trump said he expected to give away at least $4 million.

Long ago I asked about that. The Trump Organization did not return any of my calls with an answer. Trump has since said that he eventually gave the money to his foundation, though his total gifts to it since its creation (in the same year that the book came out) have come out to less than $2 million.

Then there’s his
Monopoly
-like board game. When Trump and executives from Milton-Bradley introduced
Trump: The Game
in 1989, the developer surprised everyone by declaring those royalties would go to charity, too.

Milton-Bradley took Trump at his word. It also figured it might improve sales, which were weak, if people realized their
purchases would not enrich a presumed billionaire but go to charity. Its television ads told potential buyers: “Mr. Trump’s proceeds from
Trump: The Game
will be donated to charity.”

Trump has said he made $808,000 and that the money was donated to his Donald J. Trump Foundation.

A year after the board game was created, Trump made a deal with banks to avoid personal bankruptcy. It included a clause that put him on an allowance. It was a big allowance: $5.4 million per year to support his lifestyle, including a $100,000 limit on gifts to charity in the first year.

At the time, I spent a day calling New York and New Jersey charities trying to find any disclosures of gifts made by Trump. Years earlier, I had created America’s first hard news beat covering charities and trained the original
Chronicle of Philanthropy
news staff, so I was in a position to know many people in this sector. But call after call produced nothing. Finally, one professional fund-raiser told me that Trump had been asked to buy a table at a charity dinner and Trump asked for a discount, which was declined.

These days Trump calls himself “an ardent philanthropist,” but there is almost no public record that he has made much in the way of charitable gifts, and certainly not gifts in line with his claimed wealth of more than $10 billion. In 2016, reporter David A. Fahrenthold used the same approach I tried a quarter century earlier, calling more than two hundred charities in search of gifts by Trump. He identified only a single personal donation by Trump in the seven years before he became the Republican nominee for president. It was a gift of less than $10,000 reported in 2009 by the New York City Police Athletic League, and it may have been recorded as a personal gift by mistake, Fahrenthold noted.

•    •    •

Trump is not even the largest donor to his own foundation. The family that owns the World Wrestling Federation gave more. Since 2006, the Donald J. Trump Foundation tax filings show only a single gift from its namesake. It was for $30,000. The major donors in recent years have been vendors doing business with Trump; they offer gifts that can reasonably be viewed as a kind of legal kickback by the vendors of Trump ties and other products and services sold with the Trump name.

Having contributions made this way would also be taxwise if, as reported elsewhere in this book, Trump pays little or no income tax, thanks partly to special rules that allow major real estate holders to report zero income for tax purposes. While charitable gifts are tax-deductible for someone who pays taxes, to anyone with no taxable income, that deduction is worth nothing.

Trump often encourages others to give, especially during his campaign, mixing partisan politics with charity, despite Congress making that an absolute no-no if the charities participate.

The record shows that Trump makes little or no effort to check out the veterans organizations he associates with, just as he has often failed to make even minimal inquiries into some of his business partners and associates.

In September 2015, Trump boycotted one of the Republican primary debates because Megyn Kelly, a Fox News personality, would be the on-air host. Trump instead went to the Battleship Iowa, now a museum at anchor in Long Beach, California, to deliver what his campaign said would be a major address on national defense.

Trump praised the sponsor of the event, Veterans for a Strong America, and told the audience that “hundreds of
thousands” of people belonged to the organization. There were evidently two related organizations, both nonprofits, though Trump and his host never made that clear to the audience on the ship or watching on television. One was a charity, the other one of those dark money political groups that have expanded since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, enabling money from undisclosed sources to influence elections.

A quick Internet check would have revealed to the Trump campaign that the IRS had revoked the nonprofit status of Veterans for a Strong America due to their failure to file required disclosure reports. A charity disclosure organization, Guidestar, reported that it had no record of any board of directors. Every indication pointed to Veterans for a Strong America being a one-man enterprise run by a South Dakota lawyer named Joel Arends, whose operation was under investigation for suspected election improprieties in Arizona and Texas. Reporters later learned the organization had thirty dollars in the bank and debts ten times that size. None of this was in line with Trump’s promotion of the group’s immense size, influence, and good works.

But the nature of much of Trump’s declared charitable giving is far from the only illusory aspect of Trump’s life. He also has imaginary employees.

A
fter
the destruction of the Bonwit Teller building, a chorus of incredulous New Yorkers criticized Trump’s decision to destroy the façade art along with it. A front-page
New York Times
story reported unsuccessful attempts to reach Trump. Instead, the paper got a call from “John Baron, a vice president of the Trump Organization.” Baron described himself as Donald Trump’s spokesperson. He said that taking the sculptures down would have cost $32,000, delayed the construction of Trump Tower by three weeks, and run the risk of killing people if the stones crashed to the ground. As for the missing grillwork, Baron said, “We don’t know what happened.”

But there was no John Baron. The caller was Donald Trump.

For years, Trump telephoned journalists using the name John Baron (or Barron).
He posed as a publicist, planting stories about how this or that woman was in awe of him or how some
business deal was about to come his way. It worked on the
Times
reporter who covered the Bonwit Teller destruction because in 1980 it was still possible not to be familiar with Trump’s distinctive cadence, speech patterns, and tone. But gossip columnists like Liz Smith knew Trump was planting stories about himself and asking that his words be attributed to the fictional John Baron or master publicist Howard Rubenstein.

The technique lent credibility to stories by tricking journalists (whose behavior Trump has said he studied closely). Five years after deceiving
The New York Times
in the Bonwit scandal, Trump—posing as John Baron—planted the gist of a story about his upstart New Jersey Generals football team.
Then, using his own name, Trump confirmed what Baron had said, which got the story published.

The deception began when Barron (spelled with two
Rs
this time) told a wire service reporter that the owners of all the United States Football League teams had verbally agreed to pick up part of the cost of the Generals’ quarterback. That seemed like an odd form of corporate socialism, not competition. Trump had signed quarterback Doug Flutie to a six-year deal worth $8.25 million, an eye-popping figure at the time. The nascent league played a spring and summer season starting in 1982 in hopes of competing for fans and raking in the kind of money enjoyed by the National Football League during its fall and winter schedule. Owning a sports team in North Jersey also gave Trump opportunities to connect with Garden State politicians (at the same time he was building his first casino on the shore in South Jersey).

Barron identified himself as a Trump Organization vice president, a spokesman for Trump. He said Trump expected the other team owners to honor their verbal commitment to share in the cost of Flutie’s huge paycheck. “When a guy goes
out and spends more money than a player is worth, he expects to get partial reimbursement from the [other team] owners,” Barron said in suspiciously Trumpian language.

Hours later, Trump spoke to the same news service. He confirmed what Barron had said, adding that he had indeed paid too much for Flutie’s services, but that the other owners should share in the cost because he spent so much “for the good of the league.” The other owners, naturally, had no interest in paying Trump’s bills (a subject we will return to later).

For years, Trump planted stories using the name John Baron, including many unsourced items in the gossipy
New York Post
. But he did not limit his use of fake names to self-promotion. He also used his alter ego to menace enemies.

John Szabo, the immigration lawyer representing the unpaid Polish Brigade on the Bonwit Teller demolition job, had filed claims against Trump assets, hoping to prompt payment. If that did not get the workers paid, Szabo knew the liens would protect them in a subsequent lawsuit. One day a man named John Baron called Szabo, demanding that he drop the case.

“Mr. Baron had told me, in the one telephone conversation that I had with him, that Donald Trump was upset because I was ruining his credit reputation by filing the mechanics liens,” Mr. Szabo told documentary filmmaker Libby Handros. “And Mr. Trump was thinking of filing a personal lawsuit against me for $100 million for defaming his, uh … reputation.”

During the 1990 federal court trial before Judge Charles E. Stewart Jr. to enforce payment of the money owed to the Polish Brigade, Trump admitted to using the name John Baron, but said he didn’t start doing so until “years later,” after the menacing 1980 call Szabo described.

Handros’s
scathing 1991 film,
Trump: What’s the Deal?
, was shown only twice. Because of Trump’s litigation threats, no television broadcaster or distributor would risk presenting the film, according to Handros and others on the project at the time. A quarter century later, after Trump launched his 2016 presidential campaign, Handros found that continued fear of Trump lawsuits still made it impossible to get her film shown in public.