Donald Trump Is In More Than One Billion Dollars of Debt
Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig, and Mike McIntire, reporting for The New York Times:
To delve into the records is to see up close the complex structure of the president’s business interests — and the depth of his entanglements. What is popularly known as the Trump Organization is in fact a collection of more than 500 entities, virtually all of them wholly owned by Mr. Trump, many carrying his name.
Having 500 companies hardly passes the sniff test.
Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.
He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.
[…]
He reported paying taxes, in turn, on a number of his overseas ventures. In 2017, the president’s $750 contribution to the operations of the U.S. government was dwarfed by the $15,598 he or his companies paid in Panama, the $145,400 in India and the $156,824 in the Philippines.
Some patriot.
When he took office, Mr. Trump said he would pursue no new foreign deals as president. Even so, in his first two years in the White House, his revenue from abroad totaled $73 million. And while much of that money was from his golf properties in Scotland and Ireland, some came from licensing deals in countries with authoritarian-leaning leaders or thorny geopolitics — for example, $3 million from the Philippines, $2.3 million from India and $1 million from Turkey.
This certainly seems like a national security concern.
Indeed, his financial condition when he announced his run for president in 2015 lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name.
[…]
In fact, those public filings offer a distorted picture of his financial state, since they simply report revenue, not profit. In 2018, for example, Mr. Trump announced in his disclosure that he had made at least $434.9 million. The tax records deliver a very different portrait of his bottom line: $47.4 million in losses.
Some people who voted for Donald Trump — myself included, to a large degree — did so thinking that his public demeanor and the actions he was taking were a part of a facade designed to cloak a more serious, organized plan for what he would do with the presidency. It was just a gut feeling that you were voting for something more than met the eye.
I think it’s safe to say that’s exactly what happened. Unfortunately, the master plan was not to fix any of America’s systemic problems. Rather it was a last ditch, Hail Mary attempt to rescue Trump from his own personal finances as he dangled by a shortening thread over an alligator infested swamp.
When Mr. Trump glided down a gilded Trump Tower escalator to kick off his presidential campaign in June 2015, his finances needed a jolt.
His core businesses were reporting mounting losses — more than $100 million over the previous two years. The river of celebrity-driven income that had long buoyed them was running dry.
If Mr. Trump hoped his unlikely candidacy might, at least, revitalize his brand, his barrage of derogatory remarks about immigrants quickly cost him two of his biggest and easiest sources of cash — licensing deals with clothing and mattress manufacturers that had netted him more than $30 million. NBC, his partner in Miss Universe — source of nearly $20 million in profits — announced that it would no longer broadcast the pageant; he sold it soon after.
He’s just… dumb.
His entire presidency has focused on one thing: himself. There have been countless stories of Trump’s blatant corruption and very public abuse of his office for personal gain, yet they never stuck because his supporters would say “oh that’s a drop in the bucket for him, he’s so rich he doesn’t need that money”. Now, we know he needs it more than ever: the financial conflicts of interest have been one of the most central themes of his tenure. They weren’t a byproduct of installing a “businessman” as president, they were the whole point. He doesn’t care if he makes America “great” again or not, he’s happy to betray the ignoramuses, bigots, and fools who voted for him if it results in an ounce of personal gain. He only cares that the powers of the president remain available to him while he scrambles to rescue himself from impending financial ruin.
For a fairly succinct roundup of Trump’s many personal debts, check out this thread. 👇🏼
Worth noting: I suppose $1M might seem like a small loan to someone who is in debt by $1.1B.