Donald Trump presents a check to members of Support Siouxland Soldiers during a campaign event in Sioux City, Iowa, January 31, 2016. Patrick Semansky/AP
On Tuesday, shortly after the New York Times reported that President Donald Trump is demanding $230 million from the Department of Justice (DOJ) to reimburse him for legal costs related to earlier federal investigations against him, the president claimed he would donate any such funds to charity. “I’m not looking for money,” he told reporters. “I’d give it to charity or something. I would give it to charity, any money.”
Trump, almost as if unable to resist, then framed the demand as satisfying a personal grudge. “But look what they did,” he said, referring to the federal investigations against him. “They rigged the election.”
Does Trump grasp the impropriety at play? His bid to appear magnanimous suggests that he knows it doesn’t look good for a president to shake down the Justice Department for taxpayer money, particularly amid a shutdown, and especially as his administration slashes Medicaid and food stamps.
His effort to put a generous spin on this blatant grift—there is no compelling evidence that the DOJ’s investigations were launched improperly—belies Trump’s long, sordid history of stiffing contractors, and, even more notoriously, the court-ordered dissolution of his namesake charitable arm over a “shocking pattern of illegality.”
Let’s revisit some of that history, starting with the Trump Foundation, his tax-exempt nonprofit.
In 2019, a New York judge ordered the foundation to pay $2 million to an array of charities—and then shut itself down—after determining that Trump, along his children Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka, misused the foundation to further their political and business interests.
That ruling came after various indications that Trump was misusing the organization. In January 2016, while running for president, he claimed during a fundraiser for veterans’ causes that he had personally donated $1 million via the foundation. After reporters revealed that no record of such a donation existed, Trump belatedly ponied up that amount to a foundation supporting fallen Marines and police officers.
Subsequent reporting by the Washington Post found that Trump had pledged more than $8.5 million to various charities over the previous 15 years, but had only delivered on a third of it.
In 2022, Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee, another nonprofit controlled by the president, along with his business, the Trump Organization, agreed to pay $750,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by the DC attorney general charging that the committee illegally misused funds to enrich the Trump family by “grossly overpaying” his companies “for use of event space at the Trump Hotel for certain inaugural events.”
Trump’s latest nonprofit, a foundation supposedly set up to oversee his planned presidential library, is already flashing warning signs. Trump and his aides have claimed that various donations he has received while president—including funds left over from the record $250 million his 2025 inaugural committee raised from corporations; proceeds from $1 million-a-plate fundraising dinners and $5 million one-on-one meetings with the president; and the large settlements that Meta, Disney, and Paramount have paid to settle seemingly extortionary Trump lawsuits—will go to the library.
Trump even claimed the $400 million plane that Qatar gifted him, and which the Air Force is spending heavily to upgrade, will go to the library when he leaves office.
But it isn’t clear as yet which, if any, funds or other valuables have been transferred to the library foundation. The organization was incorporated in May with the president’s son Eric; Michael Boulos, the husband of Trump’s daughter Tiffany; and a lawyer who works for the president in New York serving as trustees. This suggest the foundation will be controlled by Trump’s family, not independent outsiders.
Already, the State of Florida has attempted to transfer valuable property in Miami to the foundation for a library site that also could host a hotel, condos, or other commercial ventures that could benefit the president and his family financially. (A judge temporarily halted the transfer last week in response to a lawsuit challenging its legality. ) Any assets that do make it into the foundation’s coffers can be used, legally in most cases, to pay salaries to Trump family members, provide them with free office space, and fund certain travel, experts told Mother Jones.
Trump’s abysmal track record extends to his commercial activities as well. In 2016, hundreds of contractors—from carpenters, painters, and plumbers to corporate law firms—accused the then-presidential candidate of failing to pay bills he owed. Even his former personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has publicly complained that the president barely paid him for his legal work.
If Trump does manage to coerce a settlement out of his loyal DOJ appointees—a prospect made more likely by the fact that one of them, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, uset to be his personal lawyer—there’s nothing to indicate it’ll be used to pay anyone but himself.
