Four years ago, we started a podcast on the hunch that the Trump presidency would bring up some new challenges for the way things have traditionally worked in Washington. And four years later, it's safe to say we were right. But what became clear as President Trump pushed the boundaries of his office and as our democracy faced new tests is that much of what guides our system isn't exactly codified in the way that many of us once assumed. The powers and limitations of the presidency and of many parts of our government are actually guided more often by norms and precedent. And the last four years have taught us that sometimes norms and precedent might not be enough.
Which brings us to the last week of Trump's presidency, a week that follows one of the most significant challenges our democracy has faced, and a week when the president has been impeached for an unprecedented second time. In the week since a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, Trump's business, the Trump Organization, has taken some hits. They've lost a bank, an e-commerce platform, and the hosting gig for a world-famous golf tournament. And his businesses were already struggling. They've been hurt over the years by political backlash and by closures from the coronavirus crisis. What's more, the organization is facing huge unpaid loans and potential legal challenges after Trump leaves office.
So then what's next for Donald Trump? Where do these last four years leave him, his brand, his businesses, his finances, and his political future? This is Can He Do That, a podcast that explores the powers and limitations of the American presidency. I'm Alison Michaels. Few people know the ins and outs of Donald Trump's businesses and legal circumstances better than Washington Post reporter David Farenthold. I asked him to lay out the state of Trump's businesses before the events of last week.
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Find it on WashingtonPost.com or in the app. Even before the riots, it was kind of a daunting situation. So his businesses have suffered pretty greatly from backlash to his presidency over the last few years. Obviously, they're very tied to his brand. He lost four hotels that have shut down. So it's shrinking his hotel chain. And this past year, COVID-19 has destroyed the hospitality industry, especially the high-end hospitality industry nationwide, which includes his hotel. So his hotels, which provide a lot of his revenue, had been shut down. And when they hadn't been shut down, they'd been really, really slow, mostly unoccupied. So he was facing this really terrible cash flow situation at the same time that he's facing hundreds of millions of dollars of unpaid loans coming due in the next few years. So even before the riot at the Capitol, I would have said,
His prospects were not great. It was a daunting situation he was coming into. Obviously, now it's much worse. So what major moments, again, prior to this past week, during his presidency, have had an impact on Trump's businesses over his four years in office? Did we see like an ebb and flow based on his policies or things that were happening in Washington? Were there major moments that influenced his businesses? There was sort of a slow burn in a lot of places. We wrote about Doral, Trump's resort down in Miami, and his hotel in Chicago, in New York. Those are places that depended on a kind of customer that Trump has turned against him now. Those were sort of high, high-end, very luxurious urban hotels. Like that had been the pitch to rich city people who wanted to have a very nice city experience. So those people obviously were alienated by Trump. So there had been a slow migration of those.
folks away from him. But then there had also been inflection points, most notably Charlottesville in 2017, when Trump said there were very fine people among the crowds of white supremacist demonstrators. That, I think, really affected Mar-a-Lago. Mar-a-Lago depended really heavily on very big charity galas put on by mainstream charities, not political charities like the Red Cross or the American Humane Society, things like that. Those charities which had previously said, oh, well, you know, we don't get involved in politics, so we're going to stick by Trump. We're not going to change what we're doing. After Charlottesville, more than 20 of those big clients left Mar-a-Lago, leaving Mar-a-Lago without sort of a huge source of revenue. That's probably the most comparable thing to what's happened in the last week, but even that was not on the scale of what we've seen since last Wednesday.
internally at his businesses? Has there been any kind of backlash from the people who work at the Trump Organization or at his properties? That's a really interesting question. There's not been as much as you might think. His customers have been much more rebellious than his employees. We've talked to some employees who've left over time, and we've talked to, you know, folks who were in the high levels of his businesses, and a few of them have left, but many of them have stayed, I think, because either they rationalize it as I'm working for Trump Hotels, not Trump the president, or also just because maybe they like his business and they want to stay there. Of course, as we've now said, the biggest impact on his businesses have really happened over the past week in response to the riots at the Capitol. How have Trump's businesses been impacted by this? What have we seen? Well, just in the last week, he's lost some of the business partners that really propped up his business financially and in a way sort of...
Socially, it provided a lot of its social prominence. So three of its banks, Deutsche Bank, one of its biggest lenders, perhaps its biggest lender, and two banks that hold some of Trump's bank accounts have said they're not going to do business with him in the future. It's e-commerce vendor, Shopify, which operated this website called TrumpStore.com, where Trump sold kind of tchotchkes, candles, bath bombs, t-shirts with Trump's name on them. Shut the site down. So that's a loss, at least for now, of a site that provided about $900,000 of revenue every year. In tchotchkes, wow, that's impressive. I mean, I don't buy a lot of candles online, but these are expensive candles. These seem to me more expensive than candles ought to be. And then he also lost the PGA. This was, to me, one of the most important things socially and financially. So the PGA runs a tournament called the PGA Championship, one of the four golf majors that
way back in 2014 to be held at Trump Bedminster in 2022. That's a big thing financially because it brings a lot of advertisers. It brings a lot of fans. It brings a lot of people to Trump's course, but also socially because it would have put Donald Trump kind of at the pinnacle of professional golf. He gets to hobnob with the golf stars. He gets to be on TV. The PGA, after sticking with Trump, threw Charlottesville, threw everything else, withdrew the championship after the riot. And then the last couple of days, there's been a couple more things. The city of New York, which has longstanding contracts with Trump, and most people wouldn't believe this, Trump's a contract to run a carousel in Central Park, two ice rinks in Central Park, and a golf course in New York. All those things, the city says it's going to take all those contracts away. And just today, I'm reporting the Girl Scouts have got their ties with Donald Trump. The Girl Scouts rented office space from him in one of his buildings in New York, and they say they
for another space. So he's probably not getting cookies this year. He's going to have to buy them like everybody else. So this is all particularly bad business news for Trump because he happens to be a man with some debts to pay. What financial situation is Trump facing when he leaves office in terms of his debts? Not a great one. So he borrowed a huge amount of money from Deutsche Bank, more than $300 million for three properties. So the Trump Chicago Hotel, Trump Doral, which is his resort down by Miami, and the Trump Hotel in D.C. He still owes hundreds of millions of dollars on those properties. And the loans are coming due in the next few years. None of those properties is doing that well, especially now after COVID. We know from other reporting we've done, reporting the New York Times has done, that those properties have been losing revenue since Trump took office. And the Times reported that they've been losing.
So what happens if he can't pay back these debts and he can't refinance them? What happens to him and to his money? Well, he could default on the debts. He could go into bankruptcy. The problem with defaulting on the debts, just not paying them, is that he's put personal guarantees on this. That would allow Deutsche Bank to come after some of his other non-indebted assets like Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster, Trump Tower. He also could try to sell them at a discount, try to get the banks to accept a lower payoff. He said some luck with that before. He could hope that somebody else would come in and take on somebody as a partner that would help him pay off these loans. He has options, but none of them are great options. One of the things that Trump has been very adamant about, or at least he was before he took office, was that he did not sell properties. He doesn't sell things. Once he buys something, he holds onto it. And maybe the only way to get out of this is to really downsize the Trump organization's properties, sell off the ones that make some money so you can pay off the debts on the other
for him to lose the election? Were they prepared to start doing things like selling off his properties? That's a good question. So the business has been run by Eric Trump, mainly Trump's son, since he took office. And Eric has not really seen himself, as far as I can tell, as somebody who makes big decisions. He sees himself as sort of a caretaker. He's going to run the business in the shape the business is in. His father left the business in a certain way. He's going to do his best to run it in that shape until his father comes back. So I don't see from them a huge amount of preparing for some major change. They've sold off some pretty useless assets and gotten some cash over the last few years. Those have kind of sold out. But they haven't done anything that, to me, says they're getting ready for a big restructuring. Now, that may come after January 20th, but so far they haven't shown any signs of that.
So Trump still has this one thing, though, which is his fame and his brand. Will he be able to leverage that fame from having been president to make money going forward? He certainly could. I mean, obviously, he's a very popular political figure, and he's gotten a lot of political donations from folks. So you'd think they could convert that political fame into revenue for the business. And I think that's still a possibility. But it probably will require retooling a little bit of what the Trump organization does. What Eric Trump had always said was going to happen after his father left office, whenever that was, was that they were going to go back to their international licensing deals, which is what they'd done before he took office, which is like...
These are great deals for Trump. Somebody in Azerbaijan wants to build a building. Donald Trump sells them the rights to use his name. They build a building. Trump basically takes no risk, puts no money into it, and gets money out from the contractor. It was an easy thing to do when he was the famous rich star of The Apprentice. It will be a harder thing to do after this presidency when he's made himself so unpopular in America and in the rest of the world. Not impossible, but it won't be as easy as it was. In the U.S., Trump obviously has a lot of political supporters that he could sell t-shirts to, that he could sell books to. The problem is the Trump Organization is not set up to do that, really. It's set up to aim at one kind of customer, which is a very rich hotel and resort customer. And those folks, I don't think, are ever going to come back around to Trump, at least not in the short term. So if they want to retool it to focus on Trump's political
fans and sell lower cost things, they're going to have to get rid of a lot of the properties they have, which are not going to rebound in the short term and are dragging them down. And all of this might be potentially complicated by some legal challenges that Trump could face after he leaves office. What cases are still out there and what happens next with those? That's a real unknown. We know about two investigations that are potentially worrisome, really three. In New York, the state attorney general is investigating Trump's financial practices. Letitia James is the AG's name there. She normally only has the right to file civil suits, but she can file criminal charges in some cases. We don't know what will come of that investigation. She hasn't concluded or accused Trump of any wrongdoing. The Manhattan district attorney is conducting a criminal investigation in the Trump organization, sort of looking at similar kind of financial practices before Trump took office. He also has not concluded.
Both of those cases, if they led to charges, led to a lawsuit, could be very time consuming and potentially. you know, very expensive for the Trump organization if nothing else. In the District of Columbia, the D.C. Attorney General has also filed a lawsuit against the Trump org for basically accusing them of funneling money out of the Trump inaugural committee in 2017. That is not going to lead to criminal charges. It's just a lawsuit, but it'll take a lot of money to defend. Then the unknowns that were created in the last week or two weeks. In Georgia, there was multiple calls to local elections officials pressuring them to quote-unquote find enough votes for Trump to win Georgia. There was noise made in Georgia about, you know, was that obstruction? Was that somebody obstructing the election process? And then there's all the charges that might come out of whatever happened on Wednesday. If the D.C. Attorney General, if the federal government ever decided to charge Trump with some kind of incitement or something else related to that attack, that could be an additional legal headache.
know if Trump's going to pardon himself or try to pardon himself. That may not save him, though, because there's an open legal question about whether a president can pardon himself. And there's a little bit of an open legal question about indicting a former president. We haven't really seen that before in history. So that raises some challenges in some of these cases, right? That's right. There's never been a former president indicted, I don't think, in any context. But the idea that you can't indict a sitting president is not in the Constitution, obviously. It's sort of a Justice Department internal guidance from a few years ago. The Justice Department stuck to that. You can't indict a sitting president. There's nothing even written down that says you can't indict a former president. It's never been done, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be done. And I think if it was ever going to be done, it might be done in the next few weeks as these authorities in New York and possibly Georgia and D.C. see their chance to go after
All right, so Trump's businesses are suffering. He might face some legal trouble when he leaves office. But even so, his popularity among Republicans is still pretty high. We've seen evidence of that over and over again. Will there likely be an effort to monetize the popularity among Republicans in particular? I'm talking about among donors or influential Republicans in some way. Will there be a way he tries to leverage that? I'm certain. I'm certain he will. I mean, look at Don Jr. And Don Jr. has written two or three books recently that are aimed mainly at selling to Republicans and Republican donors. So yes, I think that there will be books, speeches, T-shirts. I mean, there's lots of ways to monetize that Republican base. So that's why I don't say that Donald Trump's going to have no future in business. It's just going to be a very different future than the business that he has now, in my analysis. The question for me is, will he do something as...
complicated as start his own TV network, start his own social media platform. There's been some talk of that, but those things require a huge amount of capital organization, basically a lot of work at the outset. And I don't see the Trump organizations haven't been capable of that kind of organization in anything they've done recently. So I think if they're going to do something to monetize his base, it's going to be something that's much more sort of quick hit, something that's just, you know, t-shirts, books, something that has a very high overhead and very little effort. Are his Republican donors still supporting him at this point? Has last week changed anything in terms of these major donors that he's built relationships with? It has. I've been reading stories about folks in Silicon Valley and other folks who've, you know, New York, Wall Street folks who had supported Trump for a long time, but have said they're no longer supporting him and maybe no longer supporting Republicans after the events of the last week.
Sheldon Adelson, one of Trump's most important donors, died last week. The donor community, I think, is less excited about Trump than they were. That may be probably because Trump can do less for them now that he's heading out of office. But there's millions of people who love Donald Trump and would send him small amounts of money. He has monetized that kind of crowd before with Trump Stakes, Trump University. He's done things before to try to get a small amount of money from a huge number of people. So he can do it. It's just not what his business does now. And he's been doing that in the form of fundraising since the election. His campaign has raised more than $200 million since he lost. Now that he has lost, what happens to that money? Where does it go? Well, a lot of it is in a pack, which basically has almost no rules about what it can do. Trump can use it to pay himself a salary. He can use it to pay his travel expense.
I don't think you can just take the money and put it in your business, but almost nothing is prohibited from that leadership pack. So I think he will use that probably, just given the way he's used his campaign funds in the past, he's likely to use that to help his business and maybe to pay some of his legal debts. It's a lot of money. The question is, how will he use it? And will it be enough? I don't think it's enough to solve his business problems, but maybe it gives him some kind of breather. Does he have to actively be running for office in order to have access to that money? The leadership pack is basically a giant pile of free money. There's very little rules about it. I mean, there's sort of a good faith assumption that you're going to use it to run for office or advance your political goals, but there's not a lot of rules about how it's to be used. So it's really hard to use it in a way that would be illegal. Okay, I'm going to take it one
is convicted in the Senate and the Senate votes to block him from ever running for office again. What happens then? Does he still have access to that money? Well, I mean, this has never happened before, but I believe that he would still have access to the money. I think it's to be used for political advocacy. It's not necessarily a requirement that he be a political candidate or, you know, even possible to run for office. So I don't think that would take his money away. All right. And along those same lines, if Trump is removed from office, is it likely to change his financial situation or the status of his businesses even more? I ask this because I'm trying to get at the idea of whether or not it sort of secures his brand in martyrdom among those who support him, or does it put him in like a much more difficult position going forward? Well, you'd think it would cut him off if there's going to be anybody who would patronize his businesses in the next four years in the hopes that they
buying goodwill with a future president, you know, a once and future president, obviously he would lose that. I don't know how much of that business, foreign government business, the things we've seen like where all the executives from T-Mobile came and stayed at the Trump Hotel when they wanted his approval for a merger. I don't know how much of that business he'll get in the post-presidency, but certainly if he couldn't run for office again, he would get less of it. It's so hard for me to predict who he's going to be in two years, in a year. If he loses Twitter, if he loses the spotlight, if he loses the ability to command all of our attention every day. You know, obviously Donald Trump has had...
times when he's been way down before, when he's been kind of a laughingstock in American culture, he's risen up again. So I don't doubt that he has that potential, but he's now been sort of cut off from the things that have given him so much leverage. I always think about that guy, Milo Yiannopoulos. Remember that guy? Everybody talked about him in 2017. He was a huge deal. And then they cut off Twitter and it's like he fell in a well. Like I haven't heard a word about that guy. Obviously Trump is much more prominent than that person. But by taking away his easy access to the American political conversation, you know, I just don't know where he will be in a year and how hard it will be for him to command this following, that sort of attention and to monetize it. All right, Dave, you've been covering this man's businesses for I think about five years now. Do you think that there are any clear business lessons that Trump...
I would try as hard as I could to get out of the places where I am. dependent on the hotel business. That's going to be a terrible business for the next four years. I mean, Trump or no Trump, it'll be worse for him because of his name. His name drives away people, but the hotel business is going to be awful because of the rebound from COVID and the fact that we've all learned to do things over Zoom. I would get out of that and I'd sell t-shirts. I'd sell t-shirts and books. You can make a lot of money doing the volume that he could do, selling his books, his wisdom, his t-shirts, his posters to his political fans. I think that's the future rather than trying to run hotels, you know, focus on the things that require a little overhead and produce a lot of money. All right. Well, I feel fairly confident that Eric Trump nor Donald Trump will call you to hear that advice, but perhaps they will hear it here. Maybe they listen. We can do that listeners. Yeah, maybe. Maybe after four years. David, thank you so much for your time. Thank
Trump's future plans will unfold in the coming months. But what Trump will leave behind is already evident in the current state of our country. Trump's presidency has taken a sizable toll on our democracy. We find our nation now in a moment of crisis. Our institutions have been weakened. We're suffering from the consequences of an uncontrolled pandemic. We are deeply divided along partisan lines and we're failing to share a sense of reality and truth. With a few days left before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, security and law enforcement are on high alert across the country and in Washington, D.C., poised to combat chaos and attacks on federal buildings and state capitals.
This is where our country stands after four years under Trump. And after four years of asking here on this show just how much a president can do and just how far his powers will let him go. For those of you who are wondering, no, this show is not going anywhere now that Trump's presidency is ending. We'll still be here every week responding to the political news of the moment and answering critical questions about how the U.S. government works or how it's supposed to work. More on that next week. Can He Do That is a team effort here at The Post. It's produced by Arjun Singh with logo art from Loren Boglio and theme music by Ted Muldoon.
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