Until 2008, Trump Was a Big Democratic Donor

You know the meme.
There's some on the Internet who believe that during a 1998 interview with People magazine, media mogul and current Republican front-runner Donald Trump mocked the party he currently leads in the polls for the nomination for the most powerful job in the world.

"If I were to run, I'd run as a Republican. They're the dumbest group of voters in the country," the meme goes. "They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they'd still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific."
The quote has been debunked – he never said it. But before the 2008 election cycle, Trump was not exactly a card-carrying member of the Grand Old Party.
In fact, his political contributions over the last two and a half decades show that prior to the 2008 election cycle, Trump favored Democrats. He donated more than $10,000 to Hillary Clinton between 2002 and 2007, and Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., is his top beneficiary, raking in $18,350 over the years.
On the Republican side, Arizona Sen. John McCain, former Massachusetts Rep. Mark Foley and former Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Spector also benefited from Trump's generosity.
Between 1989 and 2014, Trump donated a total of $1,219,950, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, obtained through the Sunlight Foundation. The video below, courtesy of MapD, a GPU-powered database and visualization platform for interactive data analytics, shows his ever-changing political allegiance.
The left section shows the sum of Trump's political contributions by year. The blue bar marks his donations over a four year period. The pie chart on the right shows the breakdown between party lines.  

Two hundred ninety of those transactions took place before the 2008 election cycle – beginning at the start of 2007 – during which time Trump donated $303,600 to Democrats and $188,750 to Republicans – as well a $50,000 contribution to his own Donald J. Trump New York Delegate Committee.

Once the 2008 election cycle began, though, Trump shifted gears. He gave only 115 individual contributions between 2007 and 2014, with $83,800 going to Democratic politicians and affiliated groups and $588,000 going to Republicans.
This massive shift is in part due to the emergence of Super PACs, established by the highly-lauded 2009 Supreme Court case Citizens United v. FEC. Super PACs were not a donation option before the 2010 election cycle.
Of the $1,219,950 Trump has donated to politicians and groups between 1989 and 2014,  $210,000 went to Super PACs between 2010 and 2014. That includes $100,000 to the Congressional Leadership Fund, which is dedicated to electing Republicans to the House of Representatives.
Trump also cut $50,000 checks to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's Super PAC and American Crossroads – co-founded by former White House Strategist Karl Rove – which advocates for certain Republican candidates.
No individual group received more of Trump's money than the National Republican Senatorial Committee, though. He donated just $2,500 to the group in 1989 – and then six more times between 2007 and 2014, for a grand total of  $166,800.

Trump hasn't donated to a Democrat since September 2010 when he contributed $4800 to New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and $10,000 to the Democratic Committee of New York State. 
 
For nearly 20 years, Trump refused to pick a political side – financially, at least. Today, it's more clear which side he's on.