Where did Donald Trump’s money come from? Most people think Donald Trump made his money from building buildings. But that’s not true. He actually lost money doing that. So much that his rich daddy had to rescue him. Often. Speaking of rich daddies, Donald likes to say that he started in real estate with a million dollar loan from his father. But it was not a loan. Those have to be repaid. More on that in a bit. And it certainly was a lot more than a million dollars. Remember how Eric adorably claimed that his father built the New York skyline? Donald owns six buildings in New York, and not one of them stands out in the city’s skyline. So where did Donald’s money come from? Glad you asked.
For clarity, I’m dividing his life into five phases. The real estate years, the apprentice years, 2004 to 2017, the post-apprentice years, the White House years, and the current post-presidency years. One hopes perpetually post-presidency years first. Let’s look at real estate years. Donald’s father, Fred… built the Trump Organization by offering rinky-dink single-family homes and apartments to the public. Well, unless that public happened to be black. He was wildly successful, thanks in part to government subsidies, also called socialism from the swamp, and sticking with what and where he knew he was doing. Fred Trump was so successful. That when Donald was in school, his mother drove a Rolls Royce. But this Queens-based business wasn’t glamorous enough for Donald. He wanted to make a splash with the people in Manhattan. People who would never come to like or respect him. Using Daddy’s money, contacts, and expertise…
His first project, the Grand Hyatt New York, was a rare success for Donald, thanks in part to cheating the city of New York out of almost $3 million the Trump Organization owed in rent. Donald’s next project, the gaudy, gilded Trump Tower, was also a success, but Donald’s real estate winning streak was now over. He famously moved on to Atlantic City to build three casinos. And they all failed. His rich daddy would send Bagman into the casinos to buy a million dollars of chips, which would then be thrown into a dumpster. Clever way to disguise an unreported gift. But daddy buying chips wasn’t going to be enough to keep Donald’s hemorrhaging casinos afloat. I bet you’re wondering, how the hell could you lose money running a casino? Well, Donald would build casinos across the street from each other so they would cannibalize business from each other. He’s smart that way, you know. They say the house always wins. The exception appears to be if Donald Trump
is running that house. Because in 1990, when the ill-fated, tacky Trump Taj Mahal casino opened, the last of his three, Donald owed 72 banks a total of $4 billion. That could fill a lot of dumpsters with chips. Eventually, all of the casinos went bankrupt. Oh, and speaking of stiffing your creditors, another way Donald made money was by not giving it to people he owed. Over the years, several hundred contractors and workers had to sue the Trump Organization for non-payment for goods and services rendered to the company. Donald bragged about finding petty reasons not to pay after the, say, carpet had been laid. And the rest of the 90s weren’t much better. According to Donald’s income tax returns, as reviewed by the New York Times, he reported annual net losses every year in that decade. Some of it carried forward year to year. These losses would grow to $352.8 million by the end of 2002. So, as you can see by the rather important metrics of money,
Donald was a wildly unsuccessful real estate tycoon, but he was still able to pretend otherwise by calling media under fake names to give even faker inside information on how much money Donald Trump was making. One of Donald’s many forays into fiction. And what made this illusion sustainable was that, in spite of stiffing a long string of banks and creditors, Donald still managed to get enormous loans from Donald. These loans allowed Donald to pretend he was successful in real estate when he was absolutely not. Loaned Donald $425 million in 1998. During the 2000s and 2010s, Trump borrowed $2 billion billion from the bank. It was during this time that Donald Trump was fined by the US government for, among other irregularities, laundering Russian money. Just a wild coincidence, I’m sure. The problem this money is that it had to be paid back. Well, sometimes. Donald famously defaulted on a $640 million loan from
and they still continued to loan him millions. I challenge you to be able to do that at your local bank. This brings us to the apprentice years. This was the first time in Donald’s life when he started making real money. The apprentice was cheap to produce because every episode was paid for by awkward product placements. mediocre brands were willing to pay enough money, Donald was willing to have himself and the contestants pretend their product was the best thing ever. So the show made huge profits and Donald had a very generous deal with producer Mark Burnett. Donald got half the profits but before any of this could happen the apprentice had to Memory holds Donald’s gargantuan failure as a real estate tycoon. To do this, producers created the fanciful illusion that reimagined Donald as a wildly successful and even more difficult sage businessman. The first trick was not shooting any footage at his actual offices. Those rooms were small and shoddy, and the furniture was chipped, making it
difficult to trick viewers into thinking that the Trump Organization was rolling in money. So, producers recreated Donald’s offices, including a grander reception area and, famously, an even grander boardroom on a set. Looking back, this was so obvious. Now, this photo of the show’s boardroom is hilariously over the top, and clearly on a sound stage. Even the fluorescent tubes in the real boardroom were swapped out for weirdly dramatic purple ambient lighting with ceiling spotlights that no real business would want. But all of these touches helped sell Donald Trump as a super successful businessman, a ridiculous illusion essential to the show’s success. Months after the first episode of The Apprentice, in January 2004, Donald filed his individual tax return, reporting $89.9 million in net losses for his businesses during 2003. The lie of Trump’s success spun by The Apprentice perversely made that lie true. Suddenly,
Donald was making lots of money. Trump’s skill wasn’t running a business. It was making himself famous and turning that fame into a business. In the two years before The Apprentice hit the air, Donald’s income was basically half a million dollars for appearing in a McDonald’s ad. books he pretended to write and read. But with his new image from the show in the following two years, Donald made $5.2 million from 11 different ad campaigns. Again, none of this money was coming from his actual business. It was coming from the fake business of creating the illusion of his success. He got over $5 million dollars from Serta to put his name on mattresses. And given his reputation for sleeping around, this was a really good sponsorship fit. Thanks to the fake image the apprentice gave him, Donald was soon slapping his name on steaks, vodka, board games, Chinese ties, and cologne. Nothing
was beneath him to make a buck. He even sold ridiculous ringtones. You’re getting a phone call, and believe me, it better be important. I have no time for small talk, and neither do you. Next, Donald was selling vitamin starter kits for $500 apiece. Donald earned some $197 million directly from The Apprentice over 16 years, and an additional $230 million flowed from the fame associated with it. Half a million to shill for double-stuffed Oreos, another half million to peddle Domino’s pizza, $850,000 to sell laundry detergent. There were seven-figure licensing deals with hotel builders, companies with shady backgrounds in, for example, Azerbaijan, Yes, Donald was no longer building hotels, as he had done with his first project with Hyatt in New York. He was just charging real builders to slap his name on them. His hotel in Azerbaijan was used to launder money for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The Trump Soho was used to launder Russian mob money.
Donald traded on his image from the show to fleece people who thought his knowledge of the real estate business had any value with worthless get-rich-quick schemes like Donald Trump way-to-wealth seminars. Next, Donald used his phony real estate tycoon success to open an equally phony… University. But in 2016, Donald had to pay $25 million to set a litigation over Trump University, which was just an unaccredited seminar that shook students down for as much as $35,000 to learn from Donald how to get rich in real estate, something he had never done. ACN a shady multi-level marketing company under investigation for fraud in several states and countries, paid Donald almost nine million dollars to shill their video phones. It was a technology that was about to become wholly obsolete, but that didn’t stop Donald from hawking them on The Apprentice in 2011. The iPhone had been released
four years earlier. So, what did Donald do with all this money? He poured it into golf courses, which have been hemorrhaging money ever since. Again, no genius about real estate. In 2014, golf writer James Dodson played golf with Eric Trump on a new Trump course. He asked Eric, how his family was able to get financing when no banks were giving money for building golf courses since the Great Recession. Eric responded that the Trump Organization didn’t need American banks. They got all the funding they needed from Russia. Don Jr. made a similar claim in 2008. While this hasn’t been proven, we do know that Russian oligarchs close to Putin have managed to pad the Trump purse. In 2008, a Russian oligarch paid $95 million for a dated residential property owned by Donald in South Florida. That was twice the asking price, and
Thanks to such generosity from oligarchs and The Apprentice, the public still thought Donald had the Midas touch, an illusion that played a very significant part in his election to the presidency in 2016. And with the presidency, Donald faced new opportunities to make money. The House Oversight Committee estimated over $7.8 million in payments from foreign governments to Trump-owned businesses while he was president, also known as bribes. Playing an even bigger game, China, through its national bank, leased an entire floor in Trump Tower. They paid Donald $5.4 million dollars while he was in office. And there are recent reports that Egypt funneled $10 million to Donald in 2016 as a bribe to get more military support. And there were other ways to use the presidency to make money. For example, requiring the Secret Service to stay at Mar-a-Lago. Just one example from December of 2017.
Mar-a-Lago invoiced the Secret Service for 42 rooms at $396.15 apiece for a grand total of $16,638.30 for less than a two-week stay. The Secret Service was also charged for food and lodging at Donald’s other resorts. For example, they were required to stay at one of his golf courses in Scotland, even though Donald was attending a meeting on the other side of the country, and there were no discounts for protecting the president’s life. At the Bedminster Club, the Secret Service rented a three-bedroom cottage for $17,000 per month. Even the Trump campaign paid Trump properties between 10 and 17 million during the four years he was president. And then came the $320 million Donald inherited from Daddy. The values of assets were wildly undervalued in IRS filings, causing a scandal that cost his older sister her job as a federal judge. So where is Donald’s money currently coming from? Well, a big source
is relentlessly shaking down his fans for the money they put aside to pay their light bills. False pretexts are given for sending money. Dinners with Donald at Mar-a-Lago. That will never happen. After he failed to win re-election in 2020, Donald implored his cult to send him money to stop the steal. Instead, It was used to fix his 757 Boeing jet that was rusting on a tarmac with an engine missing. Of course, if Donald had just invested his vast inheritance in the stock market, he would be far richer than he is now. Instead, he squandered much of it on bad business decisions. And speaking of those, he is going to probably lose all of what’s left of Daddy’s company due to enormous judgment for business fraud in New York. Au revoir, inheritances for Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka. Sad. And that’s a failure even The Apprentice would be powerless to cover up. Donald to call himself a self-made man, something we know is a lie.
thanks to all the money from Daddy. Donald wasn’t even a self-made-up man. He had a lot of help from the producers on The Apprentice.
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The late Iraqi-British architect designed Capital Hill Residence for businessman and philanthropist Vladislav Doronin, who runs property companies Capital Group and OKO Group, and is also the owner of luxury hotel and resort brand Aman.
The house’s defining feature is a master suite set atop a slender concrete stalk that raises it high above the tree canopy. When I heard there was a secret country inside of the USA, I knew I had to check things out. After looking at the website and the few articles available online, I was excited but skeptical. The website made things look quite legitimate, with possibilities to purchase Passports and everything, but a talk with the “Sultan” brought me some doubts. Arriving to the location of Slowjamastan, I was surprised to see the infrastructure. There is a border fence, border crossing booth, pay phone, “welcome to” signs and even an independence square. The strangest part is that it is all just sitting out in the desert. Slowjamastan is not actually a country, as it is claimed, but I do think it is a fun project. Whatever the intention is to this place, I am not sure, so I will leave that up to you to decide.