How David Fahrenthold used Twitter to break some of the biggest Trump stories of 2016

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump made a lot of insinuations and vague comments with potentially dangerous implications. He brought conspiracy theories to the mainstream, declared massive untruths, and refused to divulge personal records. Any attack on his businesses would be buried in media feuds and legal threats — instigated by Trump himself. It all posed a very real dilemma for journalists.

What ensued was a pack mentality within the press, and some objectively terrible coverage; the American public seemed to have an insatiable appetite for Trump’s antics, and the media’s incentives were to cover every gaffe and outrage.

But some in the media broke through the noise. There was an exposé on the charitable givings of Trump’s foundation, uncovering years of self-indulgent purchases — some illegal — feigned as donations, and the release of a hot mic recording revealing Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women. Both of these extraordinarily telling stories about Trump were reported by one person in the past nine months: David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post.

In a cycle where the media’s coverage was critiqued by many — and attributed to Trump’s success — Fahrenthold was a rare reporter who earned the respect of many.

His investigations revealed the often shady underbellies of Trump’s private life and business, a list of revelations longer than the scoops of most outlets, let alone one reporter.

At a Harvard University conference, Fahrenthold gave the backstory on how he did this work. The stories read like an old-school reporter digging up the goods. But it turns out a guy who did most of his work on a spiral notepad relied just as much on the crowds on social media.

Here’s how Fahrenthold says he got started: Trump repeatedly claimed he and his foundation donated “millions” to charities — maybe more than $100 million, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski once said.

But in an attempt to figure out which charities received the money, Fahrenthold came up short — the campaign said it was a secret.

The scavenger hunt began; Fahrenthold said he wanted to prove the Trump campaign “right,” find where the money went, and track Trump’s much-touted charitable giving. He kept a log of the charities he contacted on spiral notebooks. And he tweeted his progress. What was at its core a story less flashy as Trump’s latest tweet, Muslim ban, or racially charged comment about a federal judge of Mexican heritage became an “adventure,” he said.

And tweeting was imperative to the process. Trump is not shy about lambasting the “biased media.” He has called journalists “lowlifes,” “scumbags,” and “lightweights,” and repeatedly claimed the press was biased against him. Publishing his questions for the campaign and the charities he had contacted kept Trump’s team — and Fahrenthold’s reporting — accountable.

In reporting Trump’s philanthropic givings, Fahrenthold found that Trump, on two occasions, used foundation money to buy portraits of himself, one for $20,000 and another for $10,000. Other than being an interesting bit of trivia, there was a legal catch with this find, Fahrenthold reported:

If Trump did not give the painting to a charity — or find a way to use it for charitable purposes — he may have violated IRS rules against “self-dealing,” which prohibit nonprofit leaders from spending charity money on themselves.

In other words, this would turn a lot of what Trump has said of his foundation’s generosity on its head.

But Trump owns property around the world — where to find the portrait?

Fahrenthold asked the world (specifically his nearly 200,000 Twitter followers) to begin the hunt. “I would hear from readers who were watching videos from other people’s proms at Trump [golf] courses hoping they could find in the background a glimpse of it,” he said.

They found one. It took a woman in Florida going through hundreds of TripAdvisor photos of Trump’s golf courses to find one of the portraits at Trump National Doral Miami. A Univision anchor in the area made a reservation at the golf course, begged the cleaning staff to let him snoop around, and ultimately documented the portrait’s existence.

The legal and image implications of this story for Trump aside, Fahrenthold found a way to report on Trump that has become a story in itself — and one that will prove to influence the coverage of many.

There’s no indication that Trump is changing his rhetoric or becoming more “presidential” in behavior. His tweets continue to be news stories, whether they are about flag burning or about the musical Hamilton. But in all this noise, and entertainment, reporting on his conflicts of interest has become an important beat for journalists.

“I didn’t go into this thinking I would take down Trump or make him lose,” Fahrenthold said. “The only thing I can say is that I understand Trump well and understand how to cover him, and that was going to be, we thought, a useless set of skills if Hillary Clinton had won, and now it is going to be a very useful set of skills.”

“And I have 190,000 Twitter followers that want to be part of this adventure.”