As a presidential candidate in 2016, Donald Trump took great pride in boasting to the public that he doesn’t settle lawsuits. “I don’t settle cases,” the Republican bragged during a primary debate in March 2016. “I don’t do it because that’s why I don’t get sued very often, because I don’t settle, unlike a lot of other people.”
Indeed, in June 2018, when the president’s fraudulent charitable foundation was taken to court, Trump made a specific vow via Twitter: “I won’t settle this case!”
Yesterday, he settled the case, agreeing to a $2 million judgment for improperly using the now-defunct Trump Foundation.
The order appears to bring to an end the New York attorney general’s lawsuit against the president and three of his oldest children over the now-shuttered foundation, which the attorney general said had engaged in repeated wrongdoing.
“Our petition detailed a shocking pattern of illegality involving the Trump Foundation — including unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing, and much more,” then-Attorney General Barbara Underwood alleged in a statement late last year.
The Washington Post had a report on the developments, which added, “In a statement signed by Trump’s attorney, the president admitted to poor oversight of the charity.”
And while I’m sure the president isn’t pleased with the $2 million judgment, this case could’ve been much worse for Trump. We are, after all, talking about an entity that was supposed to be a charitable foundation, which Trump repeatedly misused for his own interests.
As regular readers may recall, New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office compiled evidence of the president using his foundation “for his own benefit and [the] benefit of entities in which he had a financial interest.” Trump was accused of, among other things, using charitable assets to pay for portraits of himself, make political donations, pay for advertisements for Trump Hotels, settle lawsuits involving his business, and improperly intervening in the 2016 election.
According to one of the court filings in the case, the misuse of the charity was “willful and intentional.” Trump was “aware of” the legal limits, the state attorney general’s office concluded, but he ignored those limits anyway.
Given details like these, the president should consider himself lucky the judgment wasn’t more severe.
None of this, of course, should be confused with the $25 million settlement Trump had to pay in the Trump University case, in which the president ran a “school” that was little more than a scam created to take advantage of unsuspecting students who trusted the New York Republican.
It can be difficult at times to keep track of the multi-million-dollar settlements the president has had to pay in cases in which he was accused of perpetrating public frauds.
Postscript: In case this isn’t obvious, in 2016, voters were told Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both had charitable foundations, but Clinton’s was the controversial one. The irony is breathtaking.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."