Trump's charitable giving dropped to $0 by the time he left office, returns show

A notable detail within the thousands of pages of Donald Trump’s tax returns released Friday is how the former president’s charitable giving declined over the course of his time in office.

He reported over $1.8 million in charitable contributions during his first year in the White House, but that figure dropped to $0 by 2020.

The returns also address one of the mysteries about Trump's last year in office: whether he gave away his presidential salary for all four years as he’d pledged to do. For 2020 at least, the answer appears to be no.

Four years of declining giving

From the beginning of his presidential campaign, Donald Trump often bragged about his charitable giving, at times prompting questions about whether his boasts were misleading. Nonetheless, he came into office in 2017, promising to give away his salary to charity.

The newly released returns reveal that he consistently reported wages between $373,629 and $393,928 while he was in office, in line with the official presidential salary of $400,000. And for three years, he made charitable contributions of $1,860,963 in 2017, $500,150 in 2018, and $504,700 in 2019.

But in 2020, a year when Trump found himself with a tax bill of $0, he reported $0 in donations as well.

For most of his time in office, Trump touted his donations with much fanfare, such as the one he made to the National Park Service and another to the Department of Health and Human Services. That abruptly stopped in the second half of 2020 after Trump reportedly grew dissatisfied with the credit he was getting.

“Whether you’re rich or not, it’s a lot of money,” he said in March 2020. “I did it, and nobody cared...nobody said, ‘thank you.’”

What Friday’s release doesn’t show is precisely where Trump’s charitable contributions from 2017 to 2019 went in any given year.

But the 2017 returns — via an attached statement — provide some details on where the $1.8 million in charitable contributions that year came from. The lion’s share of the money, almost $1.3 million, is described as originating from “miscellaneous.”

New insights into giving in 2015 and 2016: Including a $20.7 million donation

The newly released returns also cover the two years when Donald Trump was campaigning for the presidency and his reported charitable giving then was much higher.

In 2015, he reported $21.2 million in donations with most of that money coming in the form of 150 acres of forest that he promised to preserve that year. The massive tax break had previously been revealed and led some, including New York State Attorney General Letitia James, to question if the value of that property was inflated.

The contribution is confirmed in Friday’s released files with a $20,868,111 donation reported from one of Trump’s companies, SEVEN SPRINGS LLC. Seven Springs is the name of a private Trump family estate that he first purchased in 1996.

In 2016, Trump reported about $1.2 million in charitable giving before taking office.

A controversial release of the documents

Friday's charitable giving news was just one of many revelations contained in the thousands of pages released by Democrats on Friday.

The controversial release came Friday morning when six years of Trump’s personal returns — which he filed jointly with Melania Trump — and selected business returns were reported to the House of Representatives during a brief pro-forma session with only a few lawmakers present.

The returns were simultaneously posted onto the House Ways and Means Committee website.

Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), a member of the House Ways and Means committee who presided over Friday’s brief session, released a statement afterward that defended the release.

“As the public will now be able to see, Trump used questionable or poorly substantiated deductions and a number of other tax avoidance schemes as justification to pay little or no federal income tax in several of the years examined," Beyer said in the statement.

Meanwhile, Republicans uniformly condemned Friday’s action. In a fundraising letter Thursday night, former President Trump's campaign said that “Democrats set a dangerous precedent — one they will soon regret” in a clear reference that Republicans will wield the same power when they control the committee next year.

Republicans have already said this year’s move to release taxes will have consequences in 2023. During a debate last week over whether to release the returns, Rep. Adrian Smith (R-NE) said “if you vote to release a private citizen's tax returns, it will have consequences for the precedent of how this new majority in two weeks will be governing.”

Smith, who is one of the candidates to lead the powerful tax-writing committee in 2023, added that he has heard concerns that Biden’s “family is enriched because of his political power,” suggesting that Republicans could obtain and release the tax returns of figures like Hunter Biden or others. President Biden himself has released his tax returns voluntarily for the last 24 years.

In his own statement on Friday, Trump condemned the release, but also said they showed "once again show how proudly successful I have been."

Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.

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