In the months leading up to the 2024 election, Donald Trump and his business empire faced a financial reckoning that threatened to hit the twice-impeached former president hard as he stared down several criminal indictments.
A devastating judgment in a sprawling civil fraud case pierced the heart of a decades-old narrative Trump has used to both boost his national profile and attract investments into his up-and-down real estate and branding enterprise. Trump still owes more than half a billion dollars, with growing interest, in the wake of that ruling.
Dual verdicts from defamation lawsuits brought by E Jean Carroll had put the president on the hook for another $91 million. Meanwhile, his reality television and licensing profits were declining as the Trump Organization had largely turned off a spigot of foreign branding deals during his first administration.
But the president and his two eldest sons refocused the family business to attract lucrative partnerships once again — this time by betting big on cryptocurrency and the Trump branding itself while hoovering up investors who saw in his election their own financial victory, all the while personally enriching Trump himself.
The New York Times reviewed more than 2,000 documents revealing the state of the president’s finances throughout his fraud case and into the 2024 election. After his victory, the new family business — no longer a real-estate titan — “kicked into overdrive,” according to the outlet, with international deals opening up multiple channels to funnel cash to the president, largely invisible from current financial disclosure requirements, the Times reported.
Trump was able to put up enough cash — to the tune of nearly $300 million — to appeal those cases. He has not paid down any of the judgments against him.
Rather than sell off properties to pay off his judgments, the family business doubled down into new ventures to generate millions. Internal documents suggest the moves were necessary to keep his business empire intact, according to The Times.
A flurry of money-making ventures — from Trump Sneakers, Trump Mobile and Trump Fragrances to guitars and a $59.99 Trump-approved Bible — have joined Trump’s expansive licensing footprint, all capitalizing on the family brand and his presidency.
The family’s embrace of crypto similarly requires little or no investment, risk or operational responsibility, The Times notes.
Moves into cryptocurrency and media properties — under the umbrella of the publicly traded company behind Trump’s social media platform Truth Social — instead largely rely on the family brand to turn the president’s supporters into customers.
Trump owns more than half of Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. stock, which is worth roughly $2 billion.
The family’s crypto partners also raised all or more of the capital and run the day-to-day business behind their memecoins, otherwise worthless assets that have collected tens of millions of dollars in fees.
Those business interests are now enmeshed in an administration awash in conflicts of interest. Trump, with partnerships in several crypto ventures, is effectively the industry’s chief regulator. And real estate and licensing deals allow Trump to sell access to investors buying into one of the world’s most famous names who also happens to be president.
It remains unclear how viable the family’s new businesses are, and whether the president can cash out. He cannot yet sell off his crypto, and his Truth Social would likely collapse if he unloaded his shares. But the new influx of cash on tenuous investments appears to be enough to cover legal costs and mortgages and other financial obligations.
The president’s business assets are held by The Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, which is controlled by his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr. Eric Trump effectively runs the day-to-day operations, and both serve as executive vice presidents of their father’s company.
In 2023, Trump had testified that he had between $300 million and $400 million in cash — but those balances fluctuated wildly over the years, including hitting a low of $52 million in 2018, according to documents reviewed by The Times.
Reliable long-term deals were drying up. Big brands at his Trump Tower in Manhattan, where he launched his political career in 2015, have shrunk to just one major retailer, Gucci, and a gift shop hawking Trump-branded trinkets. Vacancies at his 40 Wall Street and Trump Tower in Chicago aren’t pulling in sufficient cash to cover their costs, The Times found.
After the sale of the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C., which Trump renovated and opened as a hotel in 2016, Trump sold off his interests to a private equity firm in 2022 for $375 million.
But the buyer couldn’t cover closing costs and borrowed $28 million from the Trumps before defaulting on the loan, The Times found. Without that repayment, Trump was left with $79 million from the sale, after taxes, after having invested roughly $100 million in the project.
Meanwhile, the Trump Organization has inked deals for developments in India, Dubai, Qatar, Vietnam and Serbia, while financial support from Saudi Arabia has helped his Trump-branded golf courses.
Last year, Trump lost a years-long blockbuster civil trial in a case in which a Manhattan judge found that the president and his associates defrauded banks and investors by inflating the values of his assets in return for more favorable loans to benefit his real-estate empire.
Trump’s mogul-like persona was a “fantasy” made up of cheating, lying and outright fraud, according to the judge presiding over the lawsuit from New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose investigation reported that the Trump and his chief associates “grossly and materially inflated” assets over a decade.
Justice Arthur Engoron wrote that Trump and his co-defendants were “likely to continue their fraudulent ways unless the Court grants significant injunctive relief.
“Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological,” he wrote.
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