Donald Trump’s campaign manager defended the Republican presidential nominee against accusations of exaggerating his charitable giving.
“It is not true,” Kellyanne Conway told CNBC Monday. “I’m rebutting it right now. It’s not fair and it’s not true.
“He’s a very generous man. I’ve seen him write checks; I’ve been there when he’s writing checks to people.”
{mosads}Conway said Trump’s White House run exemplifies his generosity.
“And the fact is that the idea somebody who has made such a tremendous sacrifice to run for president — [he] didn’t need the money, didn’t need the fame, didn’t need the power, didn’t need the status — and you’ve got a lot of deals that didn’t get done, I’m sure, in the Trump corporation because the guy at the top is running for president,” she said.
“Those are tremendous sacrifices. He’s been incredibly generous. He doesn’t talk about it, but he’s been able to connect people with resources and opportunity and to help them get a hand up over time, and I think it’s incredibly important that people look at that.”
The Washington Post late last week published an extensive investigation of Trump’s charitable giving history.
The Post’s findings suggest that Trump’s public remarks about his generosity don’t match up with the numbers.
“A months-long investigation by the Washington Post has not been able to verify many of Trump’s boasts about his philanthropy,” reporter David Fahrenthold wrote in the analysis published Oct. 29.
“Instead, throughout his life in the spotlight, whether as a businessman, television star or presidential candidate, the Post found that Trump had sought credit for charity he had not given — or had claimed other people’s giving as his own.”
The Post ultimately identified $7.8 million in charitable giving directly from Trump’s pockets since the early 1980s.
Trump’s campaign last Saturday, however, told the newspaper Trump has “personally donated tens of millions of dollars … to charitable causes.”