“In the fall of 1996, a charity called the Association to Benefit Children held a ribbon-cutting in Manhattan for a new nursery school serving children with AIDS. The bold-faced names took seats up front.

[...]

Then, all of a sudden, there was Donald Trump.

‘Nobody knew he was coming,’ said Abigail Disney, another donor sitting on the dais. ‘There’s this kind of ruckus at the door, and I don’t know what was going on, and in comes Donald Trump. [He] just gets up on the podium and sits down.’

Trump was not a major donor. He was not a donor, period. He’d never given a dollar to the nursery or the Association to Benefit Children, according to Gretchen Buchenholz, the charity’s executive director then and now.

But now he was sitting in Fisher’s seat, next to Giuliani.

‘Frank Gifford turned to me and said, ‘Why is he here?’ ’ Buchenholz recalled recently. By then, the ceremony had begun. There was nothing to do.

‘Just sing past it,’ she recalled Gifford telling her.

So they warbled into the first song on the program, ‘This Little Light of Mine,’ alongside Trump and a chorus of children — with a photographer snapping photos, and Trump looking for all the world like an honored donor to the cause.

Afterward, Disney and Buchenholz recalled, Trump left without offering an explanation. Or a donation. Fisher was stuck in the audience. The charity spent months trying to repair its relationship with him.

‘I mean, what’s wrong with you, man?’ Disney recalled thinking of Trump, when it was over.”