The New York Times dropped another bombshell report about Donald Trump’s finances, culled from the information on more than a decade’s worth of tax data they obtain.
This story details how, in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Trump somehow got more than $20 million to funnel into his campaign. The Times’ reporting is its typically thorough and well-sourced. But as a lot of their stories are, it’s behind the pay-wall.
NatZero encourages you to support your local journalism, including our efforts (shameless plug for the PayPal donation button below!), but this story is so important, readers need to get a summary of what the story’s all about. So here we go:
In 2015, Donald Trump vowed to self-fund his campaign. He wasn’t going to take money from big donors to whom he would become beholding, he lied. He vowed to spend $100 million of his own money in his run for office.
The problem was, he didn’t have the cash to finance the endeavor.
Deutsche Bank, his go-to money lender refused to lend him any funds; Trump claimed he needed to renovate his golf club in Turnberry, Scotland. The bank was concerned he’d use it for other purposes.
Over four months in 2016, he sold $38.5 million in stocks, virtually his entire stock portfolio. He was bleeding cash on failing golf courses and hotels, including his Trump International hotel renovation of the Old Post Office building in Washington, DC.
After the stock sales, he was putting just $2 million of his own money into the campaign each month; in total, he only spent $65 million of his own money, not $100 million. In June 2016, his campaign had just $1.3 million cash in the bank.
Trump needed cash, and he needed it fast.
Trump turned to a friend and a business partner, Phil Ruffin, a Las Vegas hotel developer. Ruffin and Trump had formed company to build and manage the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas. The hotel wasn’t exceptionally successful: between 2010 and 2013, each of the men had put $23 million cash into the hotel to keep it afloat. By 2016, if was more stable, with $6.3 million in cash reserves.
Then, seven weeks before the 2016 election, the hotel took out a loan, personally guaranteed by Ruffin, for $30 million. The hotel then paid another entity jointly owned by Trump and Ruffin, Trump Las Vegas Sales and Marketing, which was founded in 2004.
Trump Las Vegas Sales and Marketing had no employees on payroll. It didn’t report any expenses. Its best year for revenue was 2008 when it showed a $420,756 profit–one of only two years it registered a profit.
But then came 2016: Trump Las Vegas Sales and Marketing suddenly had more than $13.7 million in profit for Trump. On disclosure forms, Trump claimed that the money came through some unspecified “deal.”
Another $2.7 million in payments–in some cases, it was listed as a “loan fee” and in others it was said to be a “sponsor fee”– were made to two holding companies in which Trump parked his shares of the Las Vegas hotel, ultimately ending up in Trump’s pocket.
The last $4.8 million was run through the hotel directly to Trump, reportedly for an unspecified “development fee” through another Trump entity, the Trump Las Vegas Development. The company also got a separate $3.4 million cash injection from an unknown source, bringing its revenue for 2016 to $8.2 million.
It appears that Ruffin used his personal wealth to guarantee a loan, which was then funneled through the jointly-owned businesses, into Trump’s pocket at a time when his campaign desperately needed money.
The Times story also points out to another curious financial relationship between Ruffin and Trump, one that arose during the Congressional testimony by former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.
Cohen was asked about rumors that Trump had received $25 million in cash from a Kansas businessman to pay the New York State settlement from the Trump University fraud. Cohen denied any knowledge of it.
Ruffin, who lives in Kansas, was asked about it. His response: “He had $28 million in back fees that he never collected. The hotel paid him [what] was owed to him. I don’t know what he did. … It was his money.”