Donald Trump’s hurricane donation fiasco demonstrates just how broke he is
During the course of the campaign, it became fairly clear that Donald Trump’s net worth wasn’t more than a fraction of what he claimed. He was willing to risk losing the election by refusing to release his tax returns so he could hide his true net worth. His debts to foreign banks became public knowledge one by one. But now we’re seeing something else entirely: Trump appears to be broke.
In the simplest of terms, net worth is defined by assets minus debt. Donald Trump’s assets are demonstrably in the billions. But his various worldwide debts, which continue to be gradually revealed, may be larger than his assets. If so, then his net worth is negative. Worse than not being a billionaire, that would make him not anything: not a millionaire, not a thousandaire. If you’re reading this and you have a current net worth of zero, you may be worth more than Trump. But it gets worse for him.
Having no net worth doesn’t mean you’re broke. If you’re regularly bringing in just enough money to pay your bills and service your debt and take care of needs, you may not be thrilled with your financial situation, but you’re not broke. The trouble for Trump is that we keep seeing evidence he is broke. We know he’s a con artist and a petty thief, so it hasn’t been shocking to see him pilfering a few million from the Secret Service, or hosting Mar-a-Lago events where he charges admission and advertises it as an opportunity to meet the president. What is stunning is how much effort he’s put into these cons for how little money he’s made from them.
This suggests Trump is cash-poor. He’s so desperate to get his hands on a few bucks in cash here and there, he’s been strategically traveling to his various properties just so he can charge the Secret Service fairly small amounts for space and equipment rental when he gets there. He’s touring the country fundraising for a 2020 reelection bid that doesn’t exist, and then spending the money on his son’s legal defense. He hosted a for-profit dinner on New Years Eve which couldn’t have brought in more than around $400,000 – which would be a total waste of an evening’s work for an actual billionaire.
The only reason for Trump to put this much effort into this kind of small dollar pilfering is that he’s not bringing in enough income to service his debts, or to have anything left to live on. If you’re cash-poor, the only quick way out of that hole is to sell off assets. But if you owe more money on each of your assets than they’re worth, which may be the case with Trump, even that won’t work. Instead you’re stuck trying to get your hands on small amounts of cash by any means possible, just to get by. That brings us to Trump’s supposed donation to Hurricane Harvey relief.
Originally the White House announced that Donald Trump would be making a million dollar personal donation to hurricane relief. But not surprisingly, the next day the story changed, and now perhaps the donation is coming from the Trump Foundation. Years ago, that was a legitimate charity: Trump would donate his personal money to it for the purpose of write-offs, and then the foundation would turn around and donate that money to charitable causes as needed. This is how most wealthy people handle it. But then that all stopped for him.
The Trump Foundation’s own publicly available nonprofit records make clear that Donald Trump stopped donating to his own foundation after the 2008 economic crash, and he never did resume donating. That means his financial situation has been so upside down since 2008 that there hasn’t been a single year where he would have even benefited from a charitable write-off. That suggests he’s been showing a net income of zero each year. Since that time he’s been caught pilfering from his charity, using it to buy things and pay his lawsuit settlements.
The Trump Foundation ceased making any meaningful donations around 2010, because there was nothing left to donate. Since that time the Attorney General of New York has torn into the Trump Foundation for fraud, and it’s been frozen. So even if Trump wanted to donate a million dollars from his Foundation to hurricane relief, he wouldn’t be allowed to. The mere floating of the idea is evidence that no such donation will be made. Trump isn’t going to make that donation out of pocket because he doesn’t have a spare million dollars on hand. He’s simply broke, and he has been for some time. It’s part of why he ran for President.
