As Vice President Harris claims a huge surge in fundraising after President Biden’s stunning decision to step aside in the presidential race, Democrats are crowing about an unusual previous donor to her earlier campaigns: Donald Trump.
Campaign finance records show that Trump — before he entered politics — donated $6,000 to Kamala D. Harris’s reelection campaigns while she was California attorney general.
This included a $5,000 donation to Harris’s campaign in September 2011 and another $1,000 in February 2013, while his daughter Ivanka Trump gave Harris’s campaign $2,000 in 2014.
“Was a wise investment,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) wrote on social media of Trump’s donation alongside an image of a $5,000 check.
The Washington Post reported on Trump’s donations in August 2020, when Harris was the running mate of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Harris, with Biden’s endorsement, has now emerged as the Democratic Party’s likely nominee to stand against Trump in the Nov. 5 election.
“So when Trump wrote that check to re-elect Kamala Harris in 2011, I bet he didn’t think she’d cash it in 2024!” former head of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele — and an outspoken Trump critic who endorsed Biden in 2020 — commented on X.
“At that time, some 15 years ago, President Trump was a global businessman and knew how to play the game and win the game with corrupt politicians like Kamala Harris,” Trump’s campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in an email early Tuesday. “Now he’s going to finish the job of throwing all these crooked politicians out of office.”
Harris was California’s attorney general from 2011 until 2016, when she was elected to the U.S. Senate. Harris said she gave Trump’s donations to charity in 2015, the year Trump began his campaign for president.
Harris previously faced questions about whether Trump’s donations were related to the legal troubles of Trump University, which shut down in 2011 after multiple investigations and student complaints.
When Trump made the donations to Harris, Trump University was already shut down and facing a class-action lawsuit from former students in California as well as an investigation by the New York attorney general. While Harris was attorney general in California, her office took no action against Trump University.
Harris did not solicit the donations from Trump, Biden’s campaign said through a spokesperson in 2020, adding that they had no effect on how Harris’s office handled allegations against Trump University.
At one time, it was not unusual for Trump to donate to Democratic candidates. As a businessman in New York, he had donated to both of the Democratic senators he would later face in presidential elections: Hillary Clinton (N.Y.) and Biden (Del.). Trump donated to Biden’s Senate campaign in 2001 and to Clinton’s several times, as recently as 2006. But after about 2010, campaign finance records show, Trump began donating almost exclusively to Republicans.
In the past, Trump has said he viewed the contribution to Harris as a favor for Eric Schneiderman, who was then the New York attorney general. In a 2013 affidavit, Trump said that a political figure close to Schneiderman “asked my daughter Ivanka if she would arrange for me to make a contribution to a fundraising event sponsored by Schneiderman for newly elected California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris.”