Trump claims he had 'many meetings' about helping dogs after taking $1.8 million from animal rescue charity

President Donald Trump, Lara Trump, and the Trump family were lambasted this weekend amid reports he and daughter-in law Lara have taken about $2 million from an animal rescue charity, donations that were made presumably to help the group rescue dogs, not to help the former president's finances.

At an event for the charity this weekend, hosted at Mar-a-Lago, Trump told donors to the Big Dog Ranch Rescue he's a big supporter of helping dogs.

"What you're doing is so important. It's so great and so important. And I'm with you 100 percent," Trump, at Mar-a-Lago, says in the video below.

"And we had many meetings in the White House, in the Oval Office having to do with saving and helping dogs. And that's what we wanted to do."

That's a lie.

"And tremendous progress has been made," he continued. "We've had many meetings actually on it and things that I never even would think is possible in terms of some of the cruelty and the horrible things that happen. And we've turned them around and made them great things."

NCRM searched the archives of the Trump White House and found many references to dogs, few positive, and none involving meetings about helping save dogs.

The Washington Post agrees.

"A review of Trump's calendar as president reveals no other events or meetings focused on dogs or pets," the Post's Philip Bump reports. "It is certainly the case that Trump's days were often filled with informal conversations in person and on the phone, some of which may have included discussion of the subject."

HuffPost reported this weekend, that a "dog rescue charity with links to Lara Trump has spent as much as $1.9 million at former President Donald Trump's properties over the last seven years and will drop an additional quarter-million at his Mar-a-Lago country club this weekend."

Here are a few of the items about dogs we found in the archives of the Trump White House.

January 10, 2018: "The drugs, for a lot of reasons, are far more dangerous than they've ever been. Even the dogs can't track them down. If they track them, they die. The dogs die just from the scent. Nobody's ever seen anything like it. So you imagine what it does to people," Trump said at a bill signing.

August 13, 2020: "And then you look at what happened in Virginia, where they have 500,000 applications sent out at random to people that have no idea what happened. And they admitted they made a mistake. And many were sent to dead people and many were sent to — a number was sent — I guess, two — that at least two, three, four were sent to dogs. One was sent to a cat," Trump said in a briefing published that day.

August 18, 2020: "You have to get voting — voting right. You can't have millions and millions of ballots sent all over the place — sent to people that are dead; sent to dogs, cats; sent to everyone. I mean, this is a serious situation. This isn't games," Trump said at the signing of a Proclamation on the 100th Anniversary of the Ratification of the 19th Amendment.

The Post adds, "People who failed or whom Trump wanted to depict as impotent had 'choked like dogs' or were 'fired like dogs' or couldn't be elected dogcatcher. The dogs he liked were ones that caught drug dealers (far better than drug detection technologies, Trump would often say, crediting anonymous law enforcement officials) or the military dog that was credited with trapping the leader of the Islamic State before he killed himself."

"In fact, I love dogs," Trump said at event celebrating Conan, the dog credited with taking out an Islamic State leader, "but they gave the dog full credit."

"They didn't give me any credit," he added, "but that's okay."