The Image of Trump as a Successful Businessman Has Always Been a Con

What he does is come into a large sum of money, whether by inheritance or from self-promotion and, from that, he relentlessly enters into business deals where he is taken to the cleaners.

There is a lot of detail in the second story in the Times today, how Trump used his stardom from The Apprentice to enter into one shady marketing deal after another, including one company whose business model is little different from a pyramid scheme. He took the money that he made from that and bought a series of golf courses, which have been losing money hand over fist.

That has put Trump into serious financial trouble:

In 2012, he borrowed $100 million against his equity in Trump Tower in Manhattan, one of his more valuable properties. A year later, he withdrew $95.8 million from his share of a real estate partnership that owns buildings in New York and California. And in 2014, he sold $98 million in stocks and bonds.

These one-time maneuvers, coupled with the more than $427 million from “The Apprentice” and licensing deals, would probably have provided enough cash to cover his golf course investments. But they cannot be repeated, and in at least one case — the Trump Tower mortgage — they need to be paid back.

In addition, he has huge balances on loans, soon to come due, from Deutsche Bank, including $160 million on his Washington hotel in the Old Post Office building and $148 million on the Doral golf resort. Neither of those businesses is turning a profit.

One might presume that, given he's going to be getting a pension from his presidenting and the various wingnut welfare gigs he'll get, that Trump will be at little risk of living in a refrigerator carton under a highway bridge, but yesterday's story had a bit of outright tax fraud outlined. Ivanka Trump, as you may recall, was an employee of the Trump Organization, which Trump wholly controls. Trump paid large consulting fees to his daughter for work that was part of her day job to begin with:

Examining the Trump Organization’s tax records, a curious pattern emerges: Between 2010 and 2018, Mr. Trump wrote off some $26 million in unexplained “consulting fees” as a business expense across nearly all of his projects.

In most cases the fees were roughly one-fifth of his income: In Azerbaijan, Mr. Trump collected $5 million on a hotel deal and reported $1.1 million in consulting fees, while in Dubai it was $3 million with a $630,000 fee, and so on.

Mysterious big payments in business deals can raise red flags, particularly in places where bribes or kickbacks to middlemen are routine. But there is no evidence that Mr. Trump, who mostly licenses his name to other people’s projects and is not involved in securing government approvals, has engaged in such practices.

Rather, there appears to be a closer-to-home explanation for at least some of the fees: Mr. Trump reduced his taxable income by treating a family member as a consultant, and then deducting the fee as a cost of doing business.

The “consultants” are not identified in the tax records. But evidence of this arrangement was gleaned by comparing the confidential tax records to the financial disclosures Ivanka Trump filed when she joined the White House staff in 2017. Ms. Trump reported receiving payments from a consulting company she co-owned, totaling $747,622, that exactly matched consulting fees claimed as tax deductions by the Trump Organization for hotel projects in Vancouver and Hawaii.

So what Trump did was gift his daughter a shitload of money and then deduct it from his taxes as "consulting fees".

Which is, as you may well imagine, rather illegal.

That is why Trump is fighting so hard to win. He needs being president for four more years to entice others to help cover his upcoming financial hole. And he needs Bill Barr at DoJ to keep him out of federal prison.

Edited to add: Don the Con