Tag: Trump conflicts of interest

These Are The 25 Businesses Quietly Paying Trump $115 Million Each Year

If you really want to know who holds financial leverage over the president, focus on the big organizations inside Trump’s commercial buildings.

onald Trump has a lot of customers. There are people who purchase his food in Trump Tower, spending $20 on a burger. There are those who stay in his hotel rooms, paying $475 for a bed. There are others who join Trump-owned clubs, perhaps doling out as much as $200,000. But the president’s most important customers—by far—are the companies renting space in his buildings. 

There aren’t all that many of them, but they pay big money. In fact, just 25 tenants pay an estimated $115 million in rent every year. Those payments alone account for roughly 20% of all revenue flowing into the president’s business empire. And since leasing space tends to be a high-margin business, that $115 million might translate into $65 million of operating profit, or roughly 40% of the estimated total Trump Organization earnings in a typical year. 

Two of the most lucrative deals, involving Gucci and Nike, are close to Trump’s old home. Gucci leases space inside Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, and Nike had a location around the corner on 57th Street. The president also brings in significant sums at 40 Wall Street, a skyscraper in Lower Manhattan, where Walgreens Boots Alliance pays a reported $3.4 million a year in rent. Continue reading.

Donald Trump’s Debt to China

Earlier this week, the right-leaning commentator Walter Russell Mead published a column in the Wall Street Journal arguing that Donald Trump’s best chance of being reëlected in November is to run against China. “With the economy in shambles and the pandemic ravaging the country, making the election a referendum on China is perhaps Mr. Trump’s only chance to extend his White House tenure past January 2021,” Mead wrote. This strategy would enable Trump to exploit a coronavirus-related distrust of China, Mead added, and it would create problems for Democrats which would include, but also go beyond, Hunter Biden’s business ties to the Middle Kingdom. Plenty “of other senior Democrats have made money (in China), supported trade policies that gave away too much without holding Beijing accountable, or praised China’s government in ways that would make painful viewing in a campaign ad today,” Mead said.

The column sounded cynical, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. Trump’s campaign has already released an ad highlighting Hunter Biden’s connection to a Chinese bank, and Trump said last weekend that if Joe Biden was elected foreign countries such as China and Mexico would “own” him. On Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo upped the ante, blaming China for the global covid-19 death toll. In an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, he said, “China caused an enormous amount of pain, loss of life, and now a huge challenge for the global economy and the American economy, as well, by not sharing the information they had” about the virus. Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas and a longtime China hawk, called for a big military buildup in East Asia. “The Chinese Communist Party will try to exploit the world’s weakness in the wake of a virus it unleashed,” Cotton claimed on Thursday. “We cannot allow it to succeed.”

With criticisms of Trump’s handling of the pandemic growing and new opinion polls showing him trailing Biden in several key battleground states, we are sure to see more of these diversions. But adopting a China campaign strategy would also present a number of problems for Trump, beginning with the fact that Hunter Biden’s investment partnership isn’t the only American business that received funding from Chinese entities. In 2012, the Bank of China, a commercial bank owned by the Chinese state, provided more than two hundred million dollars in loans to a New York office building that Trump co-owns, Politico reported on Friday. The loans will come due in 2022, “in the middle of what could be Trump’s second term,” the timely article noted. Continue reading.

Nine questions about President Trump’s businesses and possible conflicts of interest

The following article by David A. Fahrenthold and Jonathan O’Connell was posted on the Washington Post website January 30, 2018:

The Washington Post’s David A. Fahrenthold takes a look at the Trump Organization’s real estate business nearly a year into President Trump’s tenure. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)

Note: This is intended to be a living Q&A. We’ll update it as news breaks and as The Washington Post turns up more details about President Trump’s businesses.

1. Does President Trump still own his company?

Yes.

But he’s not in day-to-day control of it. Continue reading “Nine questions about President Trump’s businesses and possible conflicts of interest”