Trump’s businesses were already in a ‘billion-dollar hole’ before the Capitol riot fallout

By almost any metric, the Trump administration has taken extraordinary measures to help the president’s businesses profit during his four years in office. The administration pushed to hold the G7 summit at President Trump’s private club and the President himself visited one of his own properties on approximately one out of every three days he’s been in office.

But the striking thing, based on the limited information we have about the inner workings of Trump’s company, is how little these moves helped the profitability of the business itself.

“They were already in trouble,” Robert Maguire, research director of watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), told Yahoo Finance. This was “before the pandemic, and then the pandemic hits and it's a huge blow.”

Forbes has been estimating Trump’s net worth for years. In March 2016, when the earliest figure was available, his net worth stood at an estimated $4.5 billion. Soon after he was inaugurated president, that figure had dropped to $3.5 billion. “We now have him at $2.5 billion,” said Dan Alexander, a Forbes senior editor and one of the people behind the data. “That's a very substantial hit.”

The coronavirus pandemic has gutted businesses across the country, with 10 million fewer jobs in the U.S. than before the pandemic began. That overall factor, combined with a host of companies cutting ties with the Trump Organization following the president’s role in inciting the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, is likely to damage the president’s business further.

TOPSHOT - US President Donald Trump waves to the media outside the White House on January 12, 2021 in Washington,DC before his departure to Alamo, Texas. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
President Donald Trump outside the White House before a recent trip to Texas. (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

“Politics has not – despite what a lot of people think – been good for his business,” said Alexander, who also wrote a book on the subject called "White House Inc.”

6 years of apparent losses

Another way to measure the health of Trump’s businesses is what we know about his revenue. CREW has analyzed the revenues from the Trump Organization, which he still owns but says is currently under the day-to-day control of his two adult sons, and finds that the money coming in has likely flatlined.

According to multiple analyses of Trump’s personal financial disclosures, the Trump Organization – which includes a range of assets from office buildings in Manhattan to hotels and golf courses around the world, and other revenue sources like licensing deals – generated a minimum of around $452 million in revenue in 2017. That figure fell to $434 million in 2018, and was $446 million in 2019, the last year for which data is available.

The business has been under intense pressure since 2015 when Trump announced his run for office by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” before adding, “some, I assume, are good people.”