STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.

No Reports

Do social media posts prove that Donald Trump "donated $25 million" to the victims of Hurricane Helene? No, that's not true: These posts offer no supporting evidence. Lead Stories found no reports that confirmed such a donation, including on Trump's account on Truth Social and his campaign website. He did post a link to a crowdfunding campaign where his supporters could donate but as of this writing it didn't reach the stated amount either.

The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Threads on September 30, 2024. It said:

Donald Trump just donated $25 million to hurricane victims.

Where are Biden and Harris?

This is what the post looked like on Threads at the time of writing:

(Source: Threads screenshot taken on Tue Oct 1 13:29:05 2024 UTC)

One day earlier, on September 30, 2024, the same claim (archived here) was published on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Both entries appeared on social media in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene's September 26, 2024, landfall (archived here), thus implying that the supposed donation was recent.

None of the posts cited a source of information or offered any supporting proof for their claim.

A search across websites indexed by Google News for the keywords seen here (archived here) showed no relevant news reports corroborating the claim.

A Google search across posts on former President Trump's account on Truth Social (archived here) for the keywords seen here (archived here) showed no matches, either.

A broad Google search across the news section on Trump's presidential campaign website for the phrase "Hurricane Helene" (archived here) produced several matches, but none of the articles manually reviewed by a Lead Stories reporter said that the candidate "donated $25 million" to the victims of the natural disaster.

On September 30, 2024, the date of the claim on Threads, the Trump campaign website mentioned (archived here) that Trump "had launched a GoFundMe campaign" for his supporters to raise money to help Hurricane Helene's victims. But, as of this writing, the campaign had not accumulated $25 million. According to its GoFundMe page, the initiative had raised just under $3.2 million -- roughly eight times less than the amount claimed in posts on social media.



(Source: Screenshot of Support Hurricane Helene Victims - Trump Authorized/GoFundMe page taken on Tue Oct 1 at 21:15:00 2024 UTC)

At the time of this fact check, the top donor, as seen above, was not Trump. Lead Stories manually reviewed the entire list of donors, but did not find Trump's name there.

Many organizations raising money for Hurricane Helene relief efforts (archived here) are nonprofits whose websites typically end with .org. But a Google search across .org websites for the keywords seen here (archived here) also generated no matches confirming the massive donation attributed to Trump.

On September 30, 2024, Trump visited (archived here) Georgia, one of the Helene-affected states. He was accompanied by Billy Graham Evangelistic Association CEO Franklin Graham (archived here) whose relief organization Samaritan's Purse is involved in delivering aid to hurricane victims.

On the day of his visit, Trump talked about having delivered basic supplies (archived here), but it was not immediately clear (archived here) whether the aid came directly from him or from Samaritan's Purse. In his remarks, transcribed by C-SPAN, Trump didn't say anything about donating "$25 million."

The Samaritan's Purse website (archived here) also contained no information that Trump had contributed to its fundraising for hurricane victims.

When asked whether Trump donated any money to the organization, Samaritan's Purse told Lead Stories via email on October 2, 2024:

We do not generally share detailed information about contributions. We refer you to President Donald Trump's team for further information.

Lead Stories contacted the Donald Trump campaign on October 1, 2024, but did not receive a response.

Other Lead Stories fact checks mentioning Trump can be found here. Fact checks about the 2024 U.S. presidential election are here.