Oct 31, 2020 · The claim: Trump's golf trips have cost the American taxpayer $141,000,000 One of President Donald Trump's favorite recreational activities is golf. Robert Reich, author and former Labor secretary,...
May 07, 2018 · An article from the Washington Post reveals just how much money Donald Trump spent on his golf course and real estate holdings in the decade before taking office, and the number is staggering. It ...
According to his tax filings, the president has lost more than $315.6 million total since 2000 from his 15 golf resorts in the U.S., Ireland, and Scotland. Trump spent $150 million in 2012 to ...
Oct 11, 2016 · Trump’s records show that he’s highly dependent on revenue from his golf courses: they pulled in 42 percent of his . total revenue, or $296 million. But how much did they earn in …
CNN reports that Trump currently owns 17 golf courses, to be exact, and you can find them pretty much anywhere golf is popular: not only up and down the East Coast United States, from Florida to New York, but also in countries like Scotland, the UAE, and Ireland.
A few of Trump's golf courses have earned stern rebukes from environmental groups due to the damage their construction has caused or could cause to surrounding ecosystems. For example, the Guardian reported in 2018 that the golf resort in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, was guilty of partially destroying a fragile dune system composed of sands and plant life so unique that the area had previously been recognized as a site of special scientific interest by the Scottish Natural Heritage. Over in the United States, ABC says a Trump National Golf Course in Virginia was cited for cutting down trees in a protected area that was vulnerable to flooding, less than a decade after previously getting in trouble for chopping down another 400 trees. The justification? They wanted to make a clearer view for guests.
Year after year, according to Forbes, Eric Trump has borrowed his father's Westchester, New York, golf club for the Eric Trump Foundation Golf Invitational: a ritzy charity event where million of dollars are donated to St. Jude's hospital to benefit kids with cancer. As the younger Trump tells it, the greatest advantage to his event is that since it's his father's golf course, he gets to rent it out for free so all the money goes toward helping children with cancer with little upfront cost.
Trump's sons Eric and Donald Jr. currently operate his golf properties, and while Eric has stated that the business is "spectacular," according to CBS — and certain properties, such as the Doral in Miami, have certainly done quite well — the family is notoriously cagey when it comes to giving details.
In 2012, Donald Trump purchased the Ritz-Carlton golf course in Jupiter, Florida, according to NBC, and for whatever reason, a group of previous members decided to ship out. Under the former rules of the agreement, these members were permitted to continue playing golf on the course until their replacements were found: like it or not, that's the contract they signed. When Trump caught wind of this, though, he wrote a letter to the members of the club saying that, as the new owner, he wanted them gone ASAP and these former rules no longer applied. According to USA Today, Trump also refused to give the former members their refundable deposits, some of which were as high as $210,000.
Donald Trump is an avid golf fan, and he cares tremendously about his golf courses, but the one that has (in the past) held a special importance in his life has been the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Donald Trump might claim the credit for New York City's Ferry Point golf course, built over the remains of a Bronx garbage dump, but in reality, he didn't put in any of his own money. The $127 million that funded the golf course came from New York's taxpayers, according to the New York Times, but they don't see the profits. That money goes to the Trump Organization, which made a special deal to collect most of the revenue for the next 20 years, as described by CNBC, in exchange for covering upkeep expenses and building a (still missing) $10 million clubhouse. Hmm!
Using the same data for a February 2019 report, the Washington Post estimated Trump's trips to Mar-a-Lago alone cost the U.S. taxpayer approximately $64 million during his first two years in office. Roughly $10.6 million was spent on operating costs for government aircraft and boats and $3 million on temporary duty costs including transportation, ...
Post reporter Philip Bump reported Trump made 19 trips to Mar-a-Lago between January 2017 and February 2019. "If we, therefore, assume a blanket average of $3.4 million per trip, regardless of duration, the total the government has spent on Trump’s trips to the resort tops $64 million," Bump wrote.
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Trump has two golf resorts in Scotland. He opened the first, Trump International Golf Links, in Aberdeenshire in 2012 on a piece of land he had purchased six years before. The course has lost money every year since.
Trump said in a 2016 interview with Reuters that people looking at the massive losses at his golf resorts were missing the point.
"Stupidity and grandiosity should never be overlooked as possible grounds for all of this," said Daniel Shaviro, the Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation at New York University Law School, who wrote about Trump's tax returns last year.
Companies House accounts showed that Golf Recreation Scotland, Turnberry's parent company, depends on an eye-watering amount of debt — around $160 million — owed to its parent company, the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, which is registered in New York.
A group of Scottish lawmakers led by the Green Party's Patrick Harvie this year called for an "unexplained wealth order" over Trump's finances. Their central question: Where did Trump get the money to pay for his resorts in the first place?
Donald Trump "bankrupted" a golf course in Puerto Rico, leaving taxpayers there on the hook for $33 million worth of debt.
A Trump company was unable to save a floundering Puerto Rico golf club and resort from bankruptcy after entering into a management and brand licensing agreement with its owners in 2008. As a result of the episode, $32.6 million in government investment was not recouped.
In the aftermath of a series of hurricanes in September 2017 — particularly Maria, which devastated the United States territory of Puerto Rico — President Donald Trump reflected on the infrastructural damage caused by those storms in a 25 September 2017 tweet: