Mother Jones assessed Trump’s finances based on his financial disclosures, and the picture ain’t pretty:
Donald Trump’s business empire has always relied on growth. But according to new personal financial disclosure documents filed by the president, it’s not growing much these days.
The main reason appears to be that he’s not adding projects, in part because he stopped taking on new foreign partners when he became president. (The company is still working on projects taken on before he took office, which I think is all kinds of reprehensible, but maybe that’s why I’ll never be rich.) His new sources of revenue, according to the article, are smaller-scale hotel projects that generated revenue in the low five figures. In fact:
Perhaps the largest “new” source of income on the president’ disclosure was $100,000 that Melania Trump reported earning from a photographic image deal with Getty Images.
Meanwhile, he lost income sources when some Trump-branded properties decided they didn’t want his brand anymore. And Trump National Doral golf course saw a revenue drop of $40.3 million, although that “may be, in part, because this year’s report counted fewer months than last year’s,” the article states.
This is important, writer Russ Choma notes, because Trump used to get big gobs of cash infused to his bank accounts from new projects opening. Not anymore.
His D.C. luxury hotel, however, is still raking in the bucks. (I think this Doonesbury strip really nails the corruption potential.) But (and it’s a big “but”), “these numbers represent revenue — not profit.”
Mother Jones continues:
Trump clearly needs a steady supply of cash—he has 13 outstanding loans, worth a minimum of $310 million (of which at least $130 million is owed to troubled Deutsche Bank). The majority of the loans will come due before the end of what would be Trump’s second term. One loan, worth between $5 and $25 million is due next year—Trump must either pay it off, or find new financing. In the meantime, there are interest payments and loan covenants—that is, agreements with lenders that might require a certain level of occupancy in a building, or certain levels of revenue generated.
Like many of you, I’ve long thought that Trump’s greatest fear is being exposed as a sorta-rich but not really rich guy whose net worth is in the toilet. Or maybe he’s just flat broke. (Murfster35 had a great post on this yesterday.) I’m reminded of a phrase from Robert Penn Warren’s A Place To Come To: “Git what’s to git, and then git.” That’s TrumpWorld’s goal, but I’m still thinking that reality and accountability have a chance to get them first.