Humiliating Donald Trump Purchase Was Paid For With His Charity's Money
Forget the lawsuits, the bankruptcies and myriad failed business ventures—this potentially illegal purchase unearthed by the Washington Post is Donald Trump’s most embarrassing executive decision yet.
According to the paper’s reporting, Donald Trump once used his charity’s money to buy himself... a $12,000 Tim Tebow helmet.
Trump apparently humiliated himself at a 2012 Susan G. Komen fundraiser, where he got into a bidding war (!) over the Tebow helmet. He paid for the gilded garbage, the Post reports, with funds from his foundation.
Sounds illegal, and it might be, depending on what he did with it. Unless he donated it to charity—which frankly doesn’t sound like something he’d do—it was probably a violation of the IRS’s rules against self-dealing.
Still, the fate of his trash purchase remains unknown—the Post notes he doesn’t currently display it with his other sports memorabilia, either because he doesn’t have it or because he doesn’t feel like owning himself every day.
Trump’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment. In a Wall Street Journal video of Trump’s business office in New York last year, he showed off a table of sports helmets — but the Tebow helmet did not appear to be among them.
One possible reason: the Tebow gear has lost some of its cache. In hindsight, Trump’s famous eye for a good deal seems to have deserted him on the night of the auction: as it turned out, he was buying Tebow gear close to its peak price.
Similar helmets are currently going for around $400, which sounds high.