President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Exactly.

You want to pay to use the course for the weekend to raise money? OK, fine. But don't say you're getting it for free when you're not.

 

How much money do you need to raise for charity before it's OK to lie to your donors?

 

Yes, but has anyone come close to nailing down just how much we're talking? Because "zero" overhead/expenses is puffery, while "practically zero" isn't. If in raising $12 million you dropped a sawbuck on some dry-cleaning, you haven't lied to your donors. At some point beyond that -- I don't know what that point is -- you have.

 

I wonder if this looming meltdown of Qatar in the Middle East isn't going to be what royally fucks things up while we're looking (I wouldn't say distracted) elsewhere. And Trump's dumbshit tweets are not helping. Just look at Bob Corker's expression as he gets a load of the president's latest mess in real time.

Foreign Relations chairman stunned by Trump's Qatar tweets

 

It's not that he spent money to raise money. And it's not just that he said he wasn't. It's that the money spent went to his family. That's graft.

 

There's no evidence he lied, or didn't get the "assets for free".

He could have gotten the course for free, but paid for something like a tent to be set up and/or the caterer for a fancy lunch that was held, and paid that through the Trump organization.

 

That may be true -- in fact, it probably is -- but I haven't seen that clearly laid out w.r.t. the Eric Trump Foundation.

 

All four should be dragged off in handcuffs in full view of the world for refusing to answer questions they are obligated to answer under oath.

 

He never said his fundraising had zero expenses.

 

And beyond that, the fact that what the course billed out to the charity exceeded the bounds of what the expenses would be for even the swankiest tournament imaginable.

From the Forbes story:

 

At first the extra bills did not cost the Eric Trump Foundation anything. Shortly before the spike in costs, the Donald J. Trump Foundation donated $100,000 to the Eric Trump Foundation--a gift explicitly made, according to Gillule, to offset the increased budget. Thus, the Eric Trump donors were still seeing their money go to work for kids along the same lines as previous years.

The Eric Trump Foundation declined to comment on that donation. In effect, though, this maneuver would appear to have more in common with a drug cartel's money-laundering operation than a charity's best-practices textbook. That $100,000 in outside donations to the Donald J. Trump Foundation (remember: Trump himself didn't give to his own foundation at this time) passed through the Eric Trump Foundation--and wound up in the coffers of Donald Trump's private businesses.