Behold the hideous 6-foot portrait Trump bought with charity money

When you 'speed paint' Trump, it's not pretty.
 By 
Sasha Lekach
 on 
Original image replaced with Mashable logo
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Here we have it.

After many months of searching, Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold tracked down a visual of the Trump portrait the presidential candidate bought for $20,000 — with charity money.

Fahrenthold discovered that in 2007 Trump used money from the Donald J. Trump Foundation to buy a 6-foot portrait of, you guessed it, himself. The whereabouts of the painting, seen on the right in the photo above, had been a mystery until the Washington Post started looking for the expensive artwork.


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It's important to note the photo above only shows the painting during the charity event, after a speed painter whipped it up in five minutes. It does not reveal where the painting hangs now.

The photo also includes another painting Trump bought with charity money. He spent $10,000 on the more refined picture (that actually gets his famous blond hairdo right) on the left.

Through the Post's tiresome investigative work the entire world now gets to see the six-foot likeness of Donald J. Trump that has been the butt of many jokes. The artist, Michael Israel, "speed painted" the piece during a charity event at Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida.

Some on Twitter (mostly Trump supporters) thought the piece was indeed a work of art that Trump got for a steal.

Others were more upset by the misuse of charity money than the quality of the painting.

The painting search came about after Fahrenthold started tracking (on pen and paper) where Trump said he had donated to charity, often catching Trump in a lie.

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Sasha Lekach

Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.

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