President Donald Trump and his family donated to or raised money for several 2020 Democrats in the years before his presidential campaign began, Politico reports.
Trump donated thousands to Calif. Sen. Kamala Harris and New York Sen. Kristen Gillibrand in the years between 2007 and 2013. His daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner, who are both White House advisors, gave even more to New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker. Since Trump’s election, and with the upcoming presidential election in 2020, those ties have become liabilities for these Democratic hopefuls.
“This was completely irrespective of anything to do with principles, political perspectives,” said Columbia University’s Gwenda Blair, a journalism professor who authored a book on Trump’s family. “It was about levers of power, period. And this has not changed. This has never changed.”
Ivanka Trump and Kushner, a New Jersey native, donated $10,400 to Booker in 2013, when he was mayor of Newark and running for Senate. That same year, the White House advisers hosted a fundraiser for Booker at their home in Manhattan, and were part of a bundle of contributions for the then-mayor that totaled more than $40,000.
Trump donated a total of $6,000 to Harris in 2011 and 2013, when she was running for re-election as the state’s attorney general. Trump sent donations to several state attorneys general around that time, when Trump University was being investigated. Ivanka Trump donated $2,000 to her re-election campaign.
Harris told The Sacramento Bee on Monday that she donated the same amount she received from Trump to a nonprofit in 2015. Gillibrand gave the same amount she was given to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network in 2017.
© 2023 Newsmax. All rights reserved.