Excerpted from a recent editorial in The Providence Journal

When it comes to charity, your inner compass should be your guide. Are you moved to help refugees? Endow university chairs? Clean up rivers? Neuter cats? You are free to do so.

You may feel bound to give privately, anonymously, hiding your philanthropy as the New Testament admonishes, or choose the course of public adulation, giving money so as to attach your name to buildings, achieve tax benefits or win favor public favor.

It is to this last camp that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, seems to belong.

“All of that money goes to charity,” Mr. Trump said, in an interview about his paid appearance on “Comedy Central.”

“We’ve already raised a lot of money for the vets,” Mr. Trump said about skipping a debate to conduct a fundraiser for veterans.

“I give to hundreds of charities and people in need of help,” Mr. Trump told The Associated Press last summer.

And yet, examinations by AP, The Washington Post, Nonprofit Quarterly and others have shown that Mr. Trump sometimes failed to follow through on promises, gave money donated by others, but not himself, or engaged in land exchanges that benefited his business interests.

Of course,the Clinton Foundation deserves scrutiny too. Charity Navigator, the respected rating service, delisted it, saying it can’t accurately assess the foundation's work because of its “atypical business model.” Critics have accused the foundation of spending more on overhead than on charity.

As for Mr. Trump, there’s nothing illegal about saying you’ll donate money, then failing to do it, or doing it only under the pressure of public opinion.

But it says something about a person’s character. And it raises this question as Americans head to the polls: Can Mr. Trump be trusted to do the right thing for anyone but himself?