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" Trump is a really complicated story and a difficult candidate to write about. "
David Fahrenthold
Difficult
Story
Complicated
Related Quotes:
" If you have Trump avoiding income tax and money coming in, and then he's still able to control it and use it as if it was his income to help his interests, then you're starting to see a bigger legal problem. "
David Fahrenthold
Money
Problem
Control
" Some courts have said moving an employee to a basement or closet usually amounts to punishment. But others have said this is a decision that should be made case by case. How nice is the basement office? How big is the closet? "
David Fahrenthold
Moving
Said
Office
" Millions of people would give literally anything to get their kids into a school like Harvard, and millions more simple admire it as another, brighter world. "
David Fahrenthold
People
World
School
" There are two main organizations that rate charities. They look at their finances and decide whether they are giving enough to the causes they claim to focus on. Something like 80 or 90% of their money actually goes to a charitable purpose. "
David Fahrenthold
Focus
Two
Purpose
" I started covering Trump's charitable giving sort of by accident. "
David Fahrenthold
Giving
Trump
Sort
" If someone shut down Twitter tomorrow, and Trump had to get started on some other platform, he'd never do it. And I think the whole country would be different. "
David Fahrenthold
Be Different
Country
Think
" What I found in my research on Trump's charitable giving was that often he would promise something and then never deliver, but sort of go around with people believing he'd done this thing he's promised. "
David Fahrenthold
Giving
Never
Research
" There's two sides to Trump's character, at least his pre-presidential character. One was, 'I'm the richest man you could possibly imagine, I live the life of Scrooge McDuck.' The other side was, 'I need your money. Give me money.' "
David Fahrenthold
Money
Character
Life
" You need a lot of money to become president. "
David Fahrenthold
Become
Need
President
" Trump called me a 'nasty guy' on the phone, and some of his surrogates called me 'obsessed' and biased on TV. "
David Fahrenthold
Obsessed
Phone
Some
" Trump is somebody who sees the media as basically his main constituency. So much of his self-worth and his image and his view of what the presidency should be about is the media and how he is reflected in the media. "
David Fahrenthold
View
Image
Media
" In theory, it is illegal to make the basement into a bureaucratic purgatory. In 1994, for instance, Congress prohibited agencies from making significant changes in a whistleblower's 'working conditions' as punishment for speaking out. "
David Fahrenthold
Punishment
Working
Congress
" If you have $1 billion, you can use the Clinton Foundation as a conduit, and as it goes by, Clinton gives it his prestige. "
David Fahrenthold
Goes
Use
You
" In a given year, the government may decide that farmers are growing more raisins than Americans will want to eat. That would cause supply to outstrip demand. Raisin prices would drop. And raisin farmers might go out of business. "
David Fahrenthold
Growing
Want
Government
" The expectation with family foundations is that if your name is on the foundation, unless you're dead, it's your money that's being given away. And even if you are dead, it was your money before. "
David Fahrenthold
Money
Family
Foundation
" The U.S. government has a problem with dead people. For one thing, it pays them way too much money. "
David Fahrenthold
Problem
Dead
Government
" The point of my stories was not to defeat Trump. The point was to tell readers the facts about this man running for president. How reliable was he at keeping promises? How much moral responsibility did he feel to help those less fortunate than he? By the end of the election, I felt I'd done my job. "
David Fahrenthold
Responsibility
Election
End
" In 2007, Donald Trump spent $20,000 that belonged to his charity - the Donald J. Trump Foundation - to buy a six-foot-tall portrait of himself during a fundraiser auction at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida. "
David Fahrenthold
Foundation
Club
Portrait
" I am not going to argue about whether I am a nasty guy. "
David Fahrenthold
Guy
I Am
Nasty
" If I'm owed money, but I say, 'Don't pay me, pay my cousin. Don't pay me, pay my charity,' you can do that, but then the IRS requires that you pay income tax on that. It's your income if you earned it and you directed where it went. If you exercised control over where the money went, you have to pay income tax on that. "
David Fahrenthold
Say
You
Control
" Trump started his foundation in 1987 to give away the proceeds from his book 'The Art of the Deal.' It has no paid employees and a board of five: Trump, three of his children, and a longtime Trump Organization employee. They all work a half-hour per week, according to the foundation's most recent Internal Revenue Service filing. "
David Fahrenthold
Work
Service
Art
" So much about Trump is... mysterious and slippery. Everything in his business record, you had to ask him for the details. He made himself the only source. He would either not tell you, or he was often an unreliable narrator about his own life. "
David Fahrenthold
Details
You
Life
" The biggest correlation you find is with Trump's own personal and business interests. He lives in Palm Beach part of the year, where charity galas are a big part of the life. And he runs a club in Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, that depends a lot on being rented out by charities, who can pay as much as $275,000 per night to rent out his club. "
David Fahrenthold
Life
Beach
Business
" I used to cover the environment, and it does have the advantage of the fact that when you call people up and ask them questions, their first instinct is not to lie to you. "
David Fahrenthold
Environment
Questions
People
" You know how country music stars get an extra 10 years on their life when they go to Branson? Like you're washed up, and you go to Branson, then you can last another 10 years. That's what bashing the media does. "
David Fahrenthold
Know
Life
Media
" Trump and his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, have both been criticized during their campaigns for activities related to their foundations. "
David Fahrenthold
Been
Opponent
Foundations
" The Trump campaign generally does not respond at all to my requests for information - either requests for broader data on Trump's charitable giving or narrow requests for information about specific subjects, like the $20,000 portrait of himself that Trump seems to have purchased with money from his charity. "
David Fahrenthold
Giving
Money
Information
" Financial Aid Office (FAO) administrators are scrambling to educate students on repaying loans, but a disparity in knowledge persists. "
David Fahrenthold
Office
Knowledge
Students
" I read the collected works of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and made a list of everything the old Baptist preacher had ever condemned as immoral or untoward. The subjects of his condemnation ranged from college-age women going braless to dogs wearing clothes to Beyonce. "
David Fahrenthold
Dogs
Old
Women
" The trouble with dead people often begins with something called the Death Master File, which is kept by the Social Security Administration. Every day, new reports are added, provided by relatives, funeral homes, and the state agencies that issue official death certificates. The list contains 90 million reports. "
David Fahrenthold
Security
Death
Every Day