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With a potential Donald Trump versus Kamala Harrispresidential race on the horizon, a forgotten chapter of their shared political history is resurfacing.
Between 2011 and 2013, Trump actually donated $6,000 to Harris’s campaigns, during her time as California attorney general, which spanned 2011 to 2017.
Ivanka Trump, Trump’s daughter, also gave $2,000 to Harris in 2014, according to records obtained by The Washington Post.
At the time, commentators speculated that the donations from Trump Sr. may have been to curry favor as the then-businessman’s Trump University was facing a class-action lawsuit in California.
Harris’s office didn’t prosecute the case while she was in office, though she has insisted she didn’t seek the donations and they had no effect on her decisions as AG, according to the Post.
After Trump began running for president in 2015, Harris donated his donation to a nonprofit that “advocates for civil and human rights for Central Americans," the Sacramento Bee reported at the time.
The Trump family actually have a long history of donating to both Democrats and Republicans, including liberal stalwarts like Cory Booker and Chuck Schumer.
“It’s interesting: I was looking at the ones I’m running against. I’ve contributed to most of them. Can you believe it?” Trump once bragged at an Iowa campaign stop in 2016. “I’ve given to Democrats. I’ve given to Hillary. I’ve given to everybody! Because that was my job. I gotta give to them. Because when I want something, I get it. When I call, they kiss my a**.”
Observers argue this pattern is a reflection of Trump’s past in the New York real estate world, where it was common for high-profile developers to generously give to both parties to garner political favors.
“This was completely irrespective of anything to do with principles, political perspectives,” Gwenda Blair, a Columbia University journalism professor who wrote The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire, told Politico in 2019. “It was about levers of power, period. And this has not changed. This has never changed.”
