What will the Washington Post do if Donald Trump wins?

Back in February, in a spat with Fox News, Donald Trump skipped a Republican debate and instead held a fundraiser for veterans. The outcome was to be one big Trump donation.

Washington Post reporter David Fahrenhold went on a search for that money. The search turned into an eight-month expedition to find out how truthful the Republican presidential candidate has been about his charitable giving.

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Fahrenthold has provided weekly updates about the Trump donation to Seattle’s Morning News on his search and, less than a week before election day, he summed up his findings in an Oct. 29 article for the Post.

KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross asked him to describe the findings and explain what that says about who Trump is.

“What I found was that Trump, in fact, has given some money over his lifetime – he’s given about $7.8 million going back to the early ’80s but that he’s spent a lot of his life trying to make himself seem much more generous than he actually is,” Fahrenthold said. “And, in fact, going to a lot of effort to inflate his charitable giving by taking credit for gifts that are actually other people’s money or just by showing up at charity events where he hasn’t given any money and pretending that he did.”

Fahrenthold opined that his reporting should help voters understand two main points:

A sense of Trump’s moral compass: “This is something that a lot of wealthy people feel, that they’ve made a lot of money and they have to give back. Trump often says that he feels that way; it’s important for him to be seen as somebody who feels that way but he makes a lot of effort to avoid making good on that. So it doesn’t seem that he actually does feel the moral compunction to give back that a lot of other wealthy people do. He just wants to have the image of it.”

Trump’s ability to keep promises: “This is probably more germane for people who are thinking about making him president. If Trump commits to doing something, does he feel a compunction to follow through? Does he make an effort to follow through on it? What I found was a number of times in which he promised publicly that he would give money to charity and he didn’t.”

Beyond the Trump donation

Fahrenthold admitted that he never expected the story about the Trump donation to go down this path and noted that he sent 70-plus questions to Trump’s campaign, which responded to none of them before the most recent story came out. Proof of his giving is just not available, in part because Trump has never released his tax returns. Fahrenthold said he was surprised by the lack of evidence to support Trump’s claims of charitable giving.

“I went into this thinking that he claims to be charitable, who would do that if they really weren’t? So that I would check around for a little while,” he said. “This was just back when I was looking specifically at the money he raised for veterans at the event you mentioned in Iowa. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll look around a few days, figure out that he’s given all the money away and that will be it, I’ll move onto something else.’ It was only when I realized that he was still sitting on most of that money, that, in fact, he had not given away most of the money he had raised for veterans, including the million dollars from his own pocket he said he’d give to veterans. It was only when I realized that I started to dig further and further, but I did not expect this would be something that would last for a whole year because I expected Trump would be keeping his word.”

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And, while Hillary Clinton critics expect the Democrat’s email scandal would continue to be investigated and, potentially, prosecuted into her presidency, Fahrenthold said he expects the Post will continue its investigation into Trump’s dealings if he wins.

“Of course, if he’s elected president it’s even more important to know more about his background and what he’s done in the past to follow through on his promises,” he said. “So, yes, if he’s elected president I anticipate this kind of work will continue.”

Does that include looking into his tax returns?

“Yeah, into his tax returns,” Fahrenthold responded. “We will then also start looking at the actual power he has as president but, yes, we’ll look into his tax returns. We’ll keep trying to learn more about this guy who then wouldn’t just be a prospective leader, he would be our leader.”

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