David Fahrenthold

Trump is somebody who sees the media as basically his main constituency. So much of his self-worth and his image and his view of what the presidency should be about is the media and how he is reflected in the media. ”

If someone shut down Twitter tomorrow, and Trump had to get started on some other platform, he'd never do it. And I think the whole country would be different. ”

I personally can barely remember what I was like before I came to college, what made me happy or worried or confident. I don't remember what I expected in my future, except that 'President of the United States' was about halfway up the ladder. ”

If your selling access to somebody who is a future president or current secretary of state, or if there's an implication that you are, that matters. ”

The point of my stories was not to defeat Trump. The point was to tell readers the facts about this man running for president. How reliable was he at keeping promises? How much moral responsibility did he feel to help those less fortunate than he? By the end of the election, I felt I'd done my job. ”

The Trump Foundation's tax returns are public. That's one thing. So we can look through them in a way that we can't look through his personal tax returns. They're publicly available going back to the beginning of the foundation, which is 1987. ”

The biggest correlation you find is with Trump's own personal and business interests. He lives in Palm Beach part of the year, where charity galas are a big part of the life. And he runs a club in Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, that depends a lot on being rented out by charities, who can pay as much as $275,000 per night to rent out his club. ”

Federal election laws bar candidates from the 'personal use' of campaign donations - a ban meant to stop candidates from buying things unrelated to their runs for office. If a purchase is a result of campaign activity, the government allows it. ”