Donald Trump has a charitable foundation.
Hillary Clinton has a charitable foundation.
One of these foundations is much larger, more successful, and has done much more good in the world. So naturally, that foundation is suspect.
Donald Trump called on Monday for the Clinton Foundation to shut down "immediately" and return money that was donated by countries "they shouldn't be taking money from."
"The Clintons have spent decades as insiders lining their own pockets and taking care of donors instead of the American people," Trump said in a statement on Monday morning. "It is now clear that the Clinton Foundation is the most corrupt enterprise in political history. What they were doing during Crooked Hillary’s time as Secretary of State was wrong then, and it is wrong now. It must be shut down immediately.”
It’s always handy when you can convict people without evidence, and without even making charges. But that is the Trump way, and a good preview of what justice would be like under Donald Trump.
The Clinton Foundation has entered the mythology of the right as a massive “slush fund” for Bill, Hillary, and all their pals. Multiple stories from authorities like Breitbart have listed improbably high numbers for overhead, and improbably low numbers of dollars actually reaching people in need. And of course, it's all lies.
One independent philanthropy watchdog did an analysis of Clinton Foundation funding and concluded that about 89 percent of its funding went to charity.
Simply put, despite its name, the Clinton Foundation is not a private foundation — which typically acts as a pass-through for private donations to other charitable organizations. Rather, it is a public charity. It conducts most of its charitable activities directly.
The Clinton Foundation’s books are also open to scrutiny, like Hillary’s taxes. Meanwhile, while Donald Trump refuses to show his taxes, or detail his cash connections to Russian oligarchs, we do know that he has’t made a single donation to his neglected Donald J. Trump Foundation since 2008 (though that hasn’t stopped him from using the foundation's money to buy himself some snazzy souvenirs). It’s no wonder that he thinks of a foundation as something that’s just a corrupt way to pull in cash from people who want favors and make yourself look important: That’s exactly the way the Trump Foundation works.
Hillary has said that, should she win, the Clinton Foundation will be restructured and will no longer take foreign donations. However, the reason the foundation takes such donations today is that the Clinton Foundation is directly involved, on the ground, in programs such as:
- Clinton Development Initiative staff in Africa train rural farmers and help them get access to seeds, equipment and markets for their crops.
- Clinton Climate Initiative staff help governments in Africa and the Caribbean region with reforestation efforts, and in island nations to help develop renewable energy projects.
- Staff at the Clinton Health Access Initiative, an independent, affiliated entity, work in dozens of nations to lower the cost of HIV/AIDS medicine, scale up pediatric AIDS treatment and promote treatment of diarrhea through life-saving Zinc/ORS treatment.
- Clinton Health Matters staff work with local governments and businesses in the United States to develop wellness and physical activity plans.
The Trump Foundation is just a pass-through for people trying to get in good with Trump. It’s not an active, “operating foundation” that implements its own programs directly. It’s also much, much smaller than the Clinton Foundation. You know what they say about “billionaires” with tiny foundations, don’t you?
Well, actually, they just say they’re Donald Trump.