Wash. Post Investigates If Rare Trump Gift It Can Confirm Is The One Tied To Anti-LGBT Hate Group

Continuing its reporting on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s charitable giving practices, The Washington Post found that Trump has promised to donate $100,000 of his personal money to a church in Louisiana temporarily run by an anti-LGBT hate group leader.

In April, the Post first reported that there was no record of Trump donating any of his own money to charity in the last five years, despite his repeated suggestions to the contrary. After contacting over 250 charities, the Post’s further investigation into Trump’s personal giving practices was “mostly ... unsuccessful” at discovering proof of this supposed generosity, and only found one instance of Trump giving a personal gift from his own pocket between 2008 and May 2016.

After Trump toured areas of Louisiana devastated by recent flooding, however, CNN reporter Ashley Killough tweeted that according to a spokeswoman, Trump donated $100,000 to the Greenwell Spring Baptist Church. The interim pastor of the church, Tony Perkins, is also president of the Family Research Council (FRC) -- an organization the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as an anti-LGBT “hate group” due to the organization's known propagation of extreme falsehoods about LGBT people.

In an August 24 article, the Post investigated the reports that Trump had donated $100,000 to the hate-group leader’s church, as well as a truckload of supplies. Trump’s campaign spokesperson Hope Hicks told the Post that Trump intends to send a personal check to the Church by this coming Friday. Hicks also said that Trump was “responsible” for “donating a truckload of supplies” for the town of St. Amant, Louisiana -- though the Post was unable to independently verify that Trump was behind the truck delivery. The Post was able to confirm that Trump chose Perkins’ church over “a specific fund: the Louisiana Flood Relief Fund, run by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation.”

While the Post did not label FRC a “hate group,” it did highlight FRC’s role in condemning “homosexuality” and “what it calls ‘transgenderism.’” A Media Matters study recently documented that leading newspapers like the Post still have room to improve when describing identified anti-LGBT hate groups.