After it was revealed this summer that Planned Parenthood was selling the organs and body parts of aborted human beings to biotech companies, Donald Trump said he wasn’t sure if the organization should lose its federal funding. He even went out of his way to praise Planned Parenthood’s good work. Meet the Press host Chuck Todd found Trump’s stance interesting, so he asked Trump if he had ever been a Planned Parenthood donor. “It’s possible,” Trump replied.
It’s well known that Trump has given to liberal politicians in the past, but donations to Planned Parenthood in recent years would completely undermine the GOP frontrunner’s supposed and quite recent pro-life conversion.
I followed up this weekend with the Trump campaign to ask if they finally had a yes-or-no answer to Chuck Todd’s question. “According to our records, Mr. Trump has never donated to Planned Parenthood. This accounts for the last 25 years,” Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told THE WEEKLY STANDARD in an email. Taxes are typically filed jointly by married couples. Have any donations been made to Planned Parenthood in Trump’s wife’s name? “[To] my knowledge NO,” Hicks replied.
The Trump campaign didn’t provide any documentation to back up the claim, and Trump has repeatedly refused, unlike his GOP rivals, to release his tax returns, which may reveal charitable donations.
Former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who released his tax returns in January 2012, has raised questions about whether Trump may be refusing to release his tax returns because they might show that he’s not as wealthy as he claims to be or that he hasn’t been generous to veterans organizations as he claims.
From 2009 to 2013, the billionaire Trump’s charitable foundation gave just $57,000 to veterans organizations while providing more than $100,000 to the scandal-plagued Clinton Foundation. It also gave about $57,000 to the Susan G. Komen foundation in 2012, the same year that the breast cancer charity courted controversy over its substantial donations to Planned Parenthood. The overall amount Trump’s charitable foundation has given to charity has amounted to a miniscule fraction of his supposed net worth. In 1999, the Smoking Gun website called Trump “The .00013% Man,” referring to the percentage of his wealth that the foundation had donated. As a percentage of Trump’s overall net worth, the Donald J Trump Foundation’s contributions haven’t increased much in recent years.
Trump’s spokeswoman claimed that Trump has given “significant” personal donations to veterans, and those donations would only show up on his personal tax returns. “Mr. Trump has made significant financial and in kind contributions to many Veterans organizations, personally and not through the Donald J. Trump foundation,” Hope Hicks said in an email last month.
Without Trump’s tax returns, it’s hard to know if that claim and many of Trump’s other claims are true.
