“A lot of other wealthy people feel the responsibility to take some of the wealth they've been given and give back,” he said in a recent chat with The Fix. “To give a lot of money to a particular cancer charity or to a group researching some particular disease or their alma mater. We haven't really found anything like that with Trump.”
But even without a go-to charity, Trump still regularly claims he gives a lot of money away. So the question became, to whom?
Fahrenthold got no help from the candidate's campaign or the Trump Organization. So he started reporting the old-fashioned way: by making a list of charities to which Trump might have donated and contacting them one at a time.
And he tracked his research using an old-fashioned tool: his notebook (yes, even in the digital age, the notebook is a critical tool for journalists).
In the video above, we explore Fahrenthold's reporting and some of what he discovered along the way.
Read some of Fahrenthold's stories: