The New York Times’ Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire report on two decades of President Donald Trump’s income tax returns showing he’s paid no income taxes in 10 of the last 15 years.
Trump’s investment in golf plays a central role in revealing “struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.”
When “The Apprentice” premiered, Mr. Trump had opened only two golf courses and was renovating two more. By the end of 2015, he had 15 courses and was transforming the Old Post Office building in Washington into a Trump International Hotel. But rather than making him wealthier, the tax records reveal as never before, each new acquisition only fed the downward draft on his bottom line.
Consider the results at his largest golf resort, Trump National Doral, near Miami. Mr. Trump bought the resort for $150 million in 2012; through 2018, his losses have totaled $162.3 million. He has pumped $213 million of fresh cash into Doral, tax records show, and has a $125 million mortgage balance coming due in three years.
Overseas, the losses at Doonbeg, Aberdeen and Turnberry have been reported in annual corporate filings required-by-law.
His three courses in Europe — two in Scotland and one in Ireland — have reported a combined $63.6 million in losses.
This could explain the urgency to see Turnberry return to the Open rota. A near-term prospect that seems more in question than ever given the financials.
And the grand total?
Over all, since 2000, Mr. Trump has reported losses of $315. 6 million at the golf courses that are his prized possessions.
There was also this conflict of interest situation noted in the Times reporting.
At the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., a flood of new members starting in 2015 allowed him to pocket an additional $5 million a year from the business. At his Doral golf resort near Miami, the roofing materials manufacturer GAF spent at least $1.5 million in 2018 even as its industry was lobbying the Trump administration to roll back “egregious” federal regulations.