Donald Trump funneled $650,000 worth of his supporters’ money into an official portrait that will hang in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, according to election filings.
The former president’s Save America political action committee transferred the $650,000 “charitable contribution” to the Smithsonian in July, per the Federal Election Commission documents, which were first reported by Insider.
The Smithsonian, which houses official portraits of all former presidents, confirmed the donation, telling The Daily Beast it was “specifically” earmarked to pay for paintings of Mr Trump and former first lady Melania Trump.
“All portraits of presidents commissioned by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery are paid for with private funds raised by the museum,” a spokesperson told the outlet.
“The creation of the portraits is underway,” the museum added, noting the identities of the artists will be revealed later, as is customary.
The Independent has reached out to Donald Trump for comment.
An additional $100,000 donation from an undisclosed private donor will go towards the portraits as well, The Washington Post reports.
The six-figure donations will fund artists’ fees, framing, installation, and events surrounding the portraits, according to the museum.
The National Portrait Gallery was created by Congress in 1962, and began commissioning portraits of presidents in 1994, beginning with Ronald Sherr’s painting of George HW Bush.
Mr Trump’s use of a PAC to fund the potraits is somewhat unusual, but the sum Save America is spending is not.
A group of over 300 individual donors, including celebrities like Steven Spielberg and John Legend, contributed to the $750,000 commission fees for Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald’s acclaimed portraits of the Obamas after they left office. The two painters were the first African-American artists to have their work featured in the National Portrait Gallery.
Currently, an image of Mr Trump by photographer Pari Dukovic hangs in the gallery.
The former president and TV host is famously image-conscious, and has a history of unorthodox arrangements when it comes to paintings of himself.
In 2019, the Mr Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen claimed in congressional testimony that his boss used $60,000 in funds from a since-dissolved charitable foundation to buy a portrait of himself at an art fair in the Hamptons in 2013.
A year earlier, litigation from the New York attorney general’s office against the Donald J Trump Foundation revealed that the president’s foundation once paid $10,000 for a portrait of himself at a 2014 charity auction at Mr Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
“Some artist puts a painting up for auction, so Mr Trump donates $10,000 to start the bidding,” Trump family lawyer Alan Futerfas said during the case. “And then when the auction goes on, and no one else bids, he buys the painting.”
Save America, the Trump leadership PAC that’s funding the portrait process, has made some eyebrow-raising donations in the past.
Earlier this month, FEC documents showed that Save America paid $60,000 to Hervé Pierre Braillard, a fashion designer who styled Ms Trump in the White House, for “strategy consulting.”
During the January 6 committee hearings in Congress, legislators also accused Mr Trump’s PAC of raising $250m for an “election defence fund” that didn’t exist.
“The big lie was also a big ripoff,” Representative Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat of California, said in June.
