The task of tracking deaths for the federal bureaucracy is an enormous one; about 2.5 million Americans die each year. Federal officials say the vast majority of these cases are handled correctly: The death is recorded. Government money is no longer sent to that person. But not always.
The Trump campaign generally does not respond at all to my requests for information - either requests for broader data on Trump's charitable giving or narrow requests for information about specific subjects, like the $20,000 portrait of himself that Trump seems to have purchased with money from his charity.
Even when he was just a reality-TV star, Trump was the kind of star who got a cover story in 'Time.' But that wasn't true. The 'Time' cover is a fake. There was no 1 March 2009 issue of 'Time' magazine. And there was no issue at all in 2009 that had Trump on the cover.
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.
It wasn't until the second half of my first year that I realized you have to try to make friends and meet people at Harvard; the chances don't come to you.
Since Trump began running for president in summer 2015, he has repeatedly used his hotels and golf courses as venues for his campaign events - and paid himself for the privilege.
In theory, it is illegal to make the basement into a bureaucratic purgatory. In 1994, for instance, Congress prohibited agencies from making significant changes in a whistleblower's 'working conditions' as punishment for speaking out.
I feel like I understand Trump's character better than the average person now, having seen all of these little interactions with charity. I wanted to keep doing something that's like that, and not just doing pure politics. So my piece of the Trump empire is the golf courses, Mar-a-Lago, and the winery.
In 1996, Trump had crashed a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a charity opening a nursery school for children with AIDS. Trump, who had never donated to the charity, stole a seat onstage that had been saved for a big contributor.
It's so hard to cover Trump. What Trump says, what he feels, what he thinks changes from day to day.
A lot of other wealthy people feel the responsibility to take some of the wealth they've been given and give back: 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.
What I found in my research on Trump's charitable giving was that often he would promise something and then never deliver, but sort of go around with people believing he'd done this thing he's promised.
The Trump people make it extremely hard to figure out what's going on with their businesses, so we've done things like try to figure out all the people, the charities who rented out ballrooms and hotel rooms, all the NBA teams that stay at his hotels, people that pay him a lot of money and have other choices.
The federal helium program sells vast amounts of the gas to U.S. companies that use it in everything from party balloons to MRI machines. If the government stops, no one else is ready.