What did Donald Trump do today?

He promised that this time, unlike all the other times he's lied about it, he'll give money to charity.

Trump traveled at taxpayer expense to Florida today so that he could spend a single night at Mar-a-Lago before returning to Washington tomorrow. En route, he was asked about the $10 billion lawsuit he filed against the IRS for its supposed "negligence" while he himself was in charge of it, and which resulted in further evidence of his history of tax cheating being made public.

Q: You're suing the IRS. Can you talk a little bit about what it's like to be on both sides of a lawsuit 

TRUMP: It's very interesting. Another one where I — you know I've virtually won the Mar-a-Lago break-in suit and, uh, you know, I have to work out some kind of a settlement supposed to work out a settlement with myself, because you know when the FBI broke in we sued, when I was — before I was president, I said — obviously it was a very good suit, and I have that one, and I have to work out a settlement. I think what we'll do is do something for charity. I'll — you know, we're thinking about doing something for charity, where I'll give money to charity. We could make it a substantial amount, nobody would care, because it's gonna go to numerous, very good charities.

In reality, Trump is not suing the FBI for executing a search warrant that found boxes of stolen classified documents stacked halfway to the ceiling of a Mar-a-Lago bathroom after he repeatedly refused to give them back to the government that owned them. A lawsuit would happen in the courts, with rulings made by judges he can't fire, and be decided by a jury. Instead, he's pursuing an administrative claims process, in which his own appointees will "decide" if he deserves $230 million in reparations.

As for Trump's claim that he will give the $10 billion he says the IRS owes him to charity, it's possible no human being alive has been more frequently caught defrauding charities or lying about having given money to them. Reporter David Farenthold won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for a ten-part exposé on how little of the money Trump had collected for or pledged to charities benefiting veterans had actually reached them—at least, until after Trump had been caught and his lies about those donations made public.

Farenthold's reporting uncovered Trump's habit of using his own fraudulent charity to engage in self-dealing, essentially using the "charity" as a checking account. He used other people's donations to buy portraits of himself to hang in his businesses, or to settle lawsuits against himself, or even—in a spectacular move for a billionaire—to pay his son's $7 Boy Scout membership fee. Farenthold also showed that Trump himself had not given anything to the foundation in the last ten years, relying on other people's money instead. 

For good measure, Trump also diverted money meant for children's cancer charities into his businesses, made illegal political donations from his fraudulent charity to the woman who is now his Attorney General in exchange for dropping a lawsuit against his fake university, and crashed an AIDS fundraiser to pretend that he'd given it money he hadn't, among many other broken charity promises. 

The result of this lifetime of a very specific form of grift is that Trump's fraudulent charity was dissolved by New York state, and Trump was effectively banned from holding any position of trust in a nonprofit organization in the state.

Why does this matter?

• It's wrong to steal money that was meant for charity. 

• It's also wrong to lie about your plans to give money to charity. 

• Filling his pockets with money that's supposed to help other people is exactly what Trump's IRS lawsuit is intended to do.