It happened during the day, so you may or may not have heard all of it live, but on Tuesday Donald Trump held a press conference. The purpose was to address some accusations from the Hillary Clinton flacks and the press (but I repeat myself), to the effect that his pledge to donate millions to veterans' charities in late January had not been done.
In case you forgot, Trump bypassed a Republican candidates debate in January to address a fund-raising event for veterans' charities. When it was done, he had announced that he had raised $6 million in total for those charities. It was assumed that he was personally donating a large sum as part of that.
So the Hillaryites, spurred by a reporter's investigative piece that suggested that nothing had been donated, made a splash by accusing Trump of not having made any donations and exaggerating the amount in any case.
I'm kind of thinking that if Hillary underestimates Trump that much, though, as to leave a big fat opening for him to charge through, she is an even weaker candidate than any of us thinks.
Trump took the first question in the news conference, which in effect asked him about the donations (we knew that was the topic of the press conference anyway). He brought out a list of the charities and read them off, along with a list of amounts to which each of them was given. The total was a bit over $5.5 million, of which $1 million came from Trump himself, who also noted that some of the pledges had not been consummated yet, and there would be over $6 million when all was said and done.
He also went on to note that raising money for a variety of such charities is not exactly an instantaneous activity. Two big things get in the way of a quick donation. First, you actually have to collect the money from those who pledged, funds which likely trickled in over time. It's one thing to pledge $100,000; it's another to get to where the check clears, if you know what I mean.
The second thing was a bit bigger -- sure, you can collect for "veterans' charities" in a kind of lumped, hypothetical way, which works OK for donating through Donald Trump (i.e., that you know your donation will go where it is intended, as opposed to the guys who call you unsolicited asking for your money for some nicely-named "charity"). But given the relatively short lead-up to the event, no one, understandably, had developed a list of which charities would get the donations.
According to Trump, that process of deciding took quite a while in some cases. When you are talking about that kind of money, you're not just handing it over to anyone with "veterans" in their title. You have to ensure they are legitimate, Government-certified entities allowed to receive donations in the first place. You have to do the research to make sure that an adequate percentage of its donations actually go to the purpose of the charity and not excessive administrative waste or extra-high salaries.
Like, say the Clinton Foundation, if you know what I mean.
Trump made it a point to note that exactly "zero dollars" of the $5.5 million had gone for the administrative cost of collecting the money. All the charities got all the money. None of it went for anything other than the actual donations straight to the charities. And some of it -- not "none" as he was accused -- was given to them early in the process, to charities which were already known to the Trump people as legitimate and had worked with him previously.
As Trump explained it, as far as the timing (and he said much had been paid out fairly early on) this all seemed to me perfectly reasonable. Since no one connected with him would have thought there was any particular need to rush the vetting process for the charities, they would get their money in due time (he noted that he had little input into which charities received donations) . And no one would have expected, save in hindsight, that anyone in the press or the Clinton campaign -- but I repeat myself -- would be trying to show that little money had actually been sent.
So Trump took the podium and, in the course of the new conference, proceeded to rip the press up one side and down the other, calling them dishonest, in the case of one reporter, "sleazy", and noted that only Donald Trump could arrange for millions to be given to veterans' charities, get applauded universally by veterans' groups, and then have the press tear him apart for not having done so immediately (or, more factually, taking a while to get some of the checks cut, but that isn't what they implied).
The poor press might have had a better case, had they not shown their true colors in the news conference by asking truly stupid questions -- and I'm quoting verbatim: "It seems like you are resistant to scrutiny" ... "Why do you continue to attack the press" ... "Do you need a thicker skin to run for this office?" ... "Are you a little out of sync?" ... "Is this a prime example of you [exaggerating the truth]?" (That one was for having raised just $5.5 million so far as opposed to $6 million) ...
Can you imagine, say, them asking Bill Clinton any of those questions about the Clinton Foundation's peculiar approach to "doing good"? Me either. Right there on display for the nation and the world, the American press tried to attack Donald Trump for the way he raised $6 million for charity. Does the press not believe or understand how ridiculous they looked doing that? On its surface, it is beyond contemptible.
Donald Trump legitimately threw cold water over the press for over a half hour -- or maybe more accurately, the press wet themselves, and Trump just showed them up for, in his own words, the sleazy pack they are. He won this round with the press by, oh, about five and a half million dollars.
And how are we expected to go into a presidential campaign and expect there to be equivalent, fair treatment of the Republican candidate by the press, when he can't even raise -- and, by the way, give -- a ton of money to charity without being asked to justify the process used, and answer a bunch of questions that would never be asked of a Democrat, and certainly not Hillary Clinton.
Oh yeah ... How much did Hillary donate while she was sending people to picket Trump's news conference? Hillary was actually asked that question by Jake Tapper of CNN, and gave an incredibly crap-filled answer which essentially said that as a carpetbagging senator from New York, she voted for legislation that raised compensation for veterans' survivors. So we're supposed to equate her voting for using taxpayer dollars and funds borrowed from China involuntarily, to Donald Trump personally donating $1 million and getting other people to donate, personally and voluntarily, another $4-5 million?
Sure we are. And, by the way, when is Hillary actually going to have a news conference, with actual reporters and actual unvetted questions?
Inquiring minds, as they say, want to know.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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