Thanks to some good old-fashioned reporting, we now have a good idea of how little Donald Trump has given away in charitable donations. Photograph by Eduardo Munoz Alvarez / Getty

Donald Trump was in Albany on Monday night, speaking to another big crowd and complaining about how Ted Cruz was robbing him of delegates in places like Colorado and Louisiana. With an eye toward next week’s primary in the Empire State, Trump also reminded the audience of Cruz’s derisive statements about “New York values,” which Cruz has since claimed were only meant to apply to liberal Democrats. “We have the greatest values,” Trump said. “Nobody has values like us.”

As far as Trump himself goes, that might well be true.

In January, I wrote about how, during a bitter dispute about his father’s will, Trump cut off benefits from the family health plan that were paying for the medical care of his nephew’s seriously ill young son. And thanks to some old-fashioned reporting, begun last year by Jeff Horwitz, of the Associated Press, and advanced this week by David A. Fahrenthold and Rosalind S. Helderman, of the Washington Post, we have a good idea of how much cash Trump has donated to charity out of what he claims is a vast personal fortune. Or, rather, we have a good idea of how little cash he has given away.

Trump’s supporters have often talked about his kind acts toward people less fortunate than himself, and he has described himself in the past as an “ardent philanthropist.” Last year, after he launched his Presidential campaign, he claimed to have made charitable donations worth more than a hundred million dollars over the past five years. But, in a report published in August, headlined “Proof of Trump’s charity giving elusive,” Horwitz wrote that the Trump campaign “has provided little documentation for most of these contributions, and tax filings of the Donald J. Trump foundation show Trump has made no charitable contributions to his own namesake nonprofit since 2008.”

Horwitz reported that Trump’s charitable foundation had given some money to worthy causes: from 2011 to 2013, the most recent period that the foundation's finances were available, the amount was just over three and a half million dollars. But where did this money come from? Mainly from businesses that had done business with Trump, such as NBCUniversal and World Wrestling Entertainment. When Horwitz pressed the Trump campaign for details of the candidate’s own contributions, he wrote, a spokeswoman “provided a partial list of donations that appeared to correspond with the foundation’s gifts—indicating that Trump may be counting other people’s charitable giving as his own.”

Much of the rest of the hundred million dollars that Trump claimed to have donated, Horwitz revealed, was in the form of questionable easements on his business properties. For example, in 2014, Trump granted a conservation easement for a driving range at one of his golf courses, in Los Angeles, pledging not to build houses on the property. Such deals are controversial. They can generate federal tax write-offs for the firms that make them, Horwitz reported. He also cited city-planning documents indicating that Trump didn’t have serious plans to build on the property to begin with.

At the time Horwitz’s piece came out, few people thought of Trump as a serious candidate, and the story didn’t get as much pick-up as it deserved. Now, Fahrenthold and Helderman, of the Post, have taken another look at Trump’s philanthropic giving, and their analysis is also a must-read. Working from the same list of charitable donations that Trump’s aides provided to Horwitz, the Post duo confirmed that the biggest contributions “were not cash gifts but land-conservation agreements to forgo development rights on property Trump owns.” It wasn’t just that there was a lack of large cash gifts from Trump himself—there weren’t any. "Not a single one of those donations was actually a personal gift of Trump’s own money,” Fahrenthold and Helderman wrote. “Many of the gifts that Trump cited to prove his generosity were free rounds of golf, given away by his courses for charity auctions and raffles.”

In the golf industry, it is common to host charity tournaments and to donate rounds as prizes at other charitable events. According to calculations by Fahrenthold and Helderman, Trump claimed credit for donating twenty-nine hundred rounds between January, 2010, and June, 2015. The list of recipients takes up ninety-three pages, and, though it includes many different not-for-profit groups, some of the beneficiaries aren’t charities at all. “They included clients, other businesses and tennis superstar Serena Williams,” Fahrenthold and Helderman noted.

The Post’s report also confirmed that some of the larger gifts Trump claimed credit for were from his foundation, which is largely funded by others. "He’s using [the foundation] as a kind of checkbook, with other people’s money,” Leslie Lenkow­sky, a professor at Indiana University’s school of philanthropy, told Fahrenthold and Helderman. "Not a good model. It’s not wrong. It’s not unique. But it’s poor philanthropy.”

So has Trump given any of his own money to charity over the past five years? The list examined by the A.P. and the Post is long, but it isn’t necessarily comprehensive. One of Trump’s top aides, Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, told Fahrenthold and Helderman that his boss had made generous gifts from his own pocket, but he declined to provide any details or documentation, saying, "We want to keep them quiet. He doesn’t want other charities to see it. Then it becomes like a feeding frenzy.”

The notion that Trump has been making gifts surreptitiously sounds a bit far-fetched—if his campaign had any information that would cast him in a good light, his team would surely release it. And, of course, there is a simple way for Trump to clear up just how generous he has been: he could release his tax filings, including the details of any deductions he has taken for charitable donations. But, of course, Trump has refused, thus far, to make these records public.