Sleazeball Trump a day late, a dollar short on veterans donations

The press should be ashamed of itself, sleazeball Donald Trump thundered today, in a weirdo news conference called to highlight his efforts to raise money for veterans groups.

Remember when he skipped a Republican debate back in January to hold a supposed telethon to raise money for veterans? And then claimed that he’d raised more than $6 million, including a $1 million donation from The Donald himself?

A May 24 report in the Washington Post offered that the money still hadn’t been accounted for.

And then today, with sleazeball Trump lambasting the media that they’d gotten it wrong, and cited 41 groups that had gotten checks, the AP called the groups and found that half had received their donations from Trump in the past week.

Many of the checks were dated: wait a minute.

Patience.

They were dated May 24

The sleazeball Trump wrote the checks the day the story saying the money hadn’t gone out to the veterans groups, then had the hairy balls to call a press conference to hammer journalists for reporting basic facts.

Things got testy at the presser, with sleazeball Trump slamming reporters for being “unbelievably dishonest,” irony of ironies there, right?

He also singled out an ABC reporter as being a “sleaze.”

No irony there. No way.

The fun thing here is Trump has managed his campaign on the margins by taking advantage of a pliant media that answers every one of his phone calls and breathlessly details each and every one of his increasingly odd pronouncements, like the one from last week that California is not actually in a drought, because, you know, Trump.

Also fun is the issue of the claim about the amount of money raised. It was the sleazeball Trump himself who made the boast about it being $6 million, though he’s backed off that figure, defiantly so.

Now the Trump folks are saying the effort raised $5.5 million, including the $1 million check that the sleazeball finally scrawled out last week.

How easy it would have been for a “billionaire” to make that $1.4 million, you know, so as not to have to back down on the $6 million figure, and look like even more the blowhard idiot in the process.

Maybe the guy isn’t as flush as he claims. That or he’s just that much a sleazeball.

Column by Chris Graham