Dismember of the Wedding

Image via Pharyngula.

I don't know that anybody's put this together before—if they have, let me know, and I'll gladly give them credit; but another thing is that Donald Trump himself provides some evidence that you can't bribe the Clintons by donating to the Foundation, because he claims to have done it himself, you know, and there's something a little bit wrong with his story:

When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me,” Trump said. “With Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding, and she came to my wedding. You know why? She didn’t have a choice, because I gave. I gave to a foundation that, frankly, that foundation is supposed to do good. I didn’t know her money would be used on private jets going all over the world.”

Problem being that you really can't get somebody to do something in 2005 (the year of Trump's most recent wedding) by paying them off in 2009. Little thing called physics, according to which traveling backwards in time is only for subatomic particles:

The Clinton Foundation lists Donald J. Trump as a contributor with a cumulative lifetime donation amount between $100,001 to $250,000. Tax forms show that the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which Trump controls, donated $100,000 to the foundation in 2009 and reserved a table at a 2010 Clinton Foundation gala for $10,000.  

So it seems like a fairly bizarre lie he's telling there.

But a well-made one, constructed, like all effective lies, out of carefully curated fragments of authentic truth. For there was a wedding he was deeply, even passionately interested in when he (or rather his foundation, of course—as usual he preferred to donate Other People's Money) made those donations. Just not his own. It was Chelsea Clinton's wedding in 2010, which we know from Joe Conason's research he was desperate to attend.

And he didn't get an invitation. He even attempted to crash it, without success.

‘I’m supposed to be at the wedding, Doug,’ said Trump briskly, ‘but I didn’t receive the invitation, and I need to know where to go.’ Band knew Trump wasn’t on the list, of course, and politely urged him to get in touch with Chelsea for directions. At that point, the would-be wedding crasher apparently gave up. Trump later called an ad placed for the wedding venue “tacky,” so take that, haters and losers.

So I think it's pretty clear that's what he made the donation for. He assumed his $100K would get him on the list.

It's suspected by some ("I don't know, but a lot people are saying") that the humiliation of not getting in to Chelsea's wedding is what drove him into running for the presidency, and this reconstruction—the idea that he thought he'd paid for it with a gentlemanly bribe, in the way the hugest, classiest people always do. If the Clintons had recognized that pay-to-play for what it was and done as the Donald expected—if they'd been the quid-pro-quo artists we're always being told they are—we might have been spared this whole ghastly circus, think about that.