Trump Claimed [Lied] An Impossibly High 100% Of His Foundation’s Money Goes To Charity

In the debate last night Donald Trump claimed that 100% of his foundation’s money goes to charity:

“I’d like to mention one thing. Trump Foundation, small foundation. People contribute, I contribute. The money goes 100 percent — 100 percent goes to different charities, including a lot of military. I don’t get anything. I don’t buy boats. I don’t buy planes. What happens — the money goes to them.

First off, this is a lie, and moderator Chris Wallace called him on it, mentioning Trump’s use of his foundation’s funds to pay a fine he owed for breaking stringent Palm Beach regulations regarding his pompously large American flag and flagpole at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

Trump has also used foundation money to buy a six-foot painting of himself (as Hillary Clinton noted, “Who does that?”), a Tim Tebow helmet, and a seemingly quid pro quo donation to Florida Attorney General Pamela Bondi in order to persuade her not to pursue a criminal investigation over the fraudulent scam that was Trump University.

But aside from the fact that Trump is lying about what his foundation spends its money on, his claim that 100% of the foundation’s money goes to charity is preposterous because, of course, at least a single penny of his foundation’s budget must go to its various overhead or operating costs, such as paying for the foundation’s administrators, right?

Is Trump suggesting that his foundation loses him money because he’s so charitable? I suppose he is, though it’s a laughably dubious claim considering Trump has not actually given any of his own money to his own foundation since 2008. It’s called the Donald J. Trump Foundation, and he doesn’t donate any of his own money… even the title of his foundation is a lie. And, again—literally—Trump used his foundation as a slush fund to bribe (allegedly, and also obviously) Florida’s attorney general not to sue him for his scam of a university.

Simply, Trump is a pathological liar. It’s not surprising that Trump would try to lie to defend himself against allegations that he steals from his own charitable foundation, but it truly is surprising that he would try to lie and say that a full 100% of his foundation’s donations go to charity without any sort of allocation for the cost of the foundation’s actual operating costs.

Photo courtesy of PBS.