Trump Business Plan

As the Mueller investigation unfolds, and more and more disclosures are made about The Trump Organization’s business practices, there is a growing suspicion concerning the nature of his company’s actual business plan. It appears that Donald Trump and his family business largely stopped actually building high rises during the recession and shifted to selling his brand: the Trump name. That has always puzzled me because it seems like the profitability of this route – even though his company took upfront fees, brokerage fees, and management fees – didn’t seem to correlate with the kind of profits we were led to believe were the sources of his billions. And this business plan was even odder, given the locations in which he chose to market his brand, coupled with the literal emptiness of the properties he was slapping his name on.

Obviously, the idea that Donald Trump is engaged in international money laundering is not new. But nobody seems to talk much about whether or not The Trump Organization is just dabbling in money laundering or whether that’s actually what it’s selling.