The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – White House Inc.: How Donald Trump Turned the Presidency into a Business by Dan Alexander

Episode Date: October 20, 2020

An in-depth investigation into Donald Trump’s business—and how he used America’s top job to service it. White House, Inc. is a newsmaking exposé that details President Trump’s efforts to make money off of politics, taking us inside his exclusive clubs, luxury hotels, overseas partnerships, commercial properties, and personal mansions. Alexander tracks hundreds of millions of dollars flowing freely between big businesses and President Trump. He explains, in plain language, how Trump tried to translate power into profit, from the 2016 campaign to the ramp-up to the 2020 campaign. Just because you turn the presidency into a business doesn’t necessarily mean you turn it into a good business. After Trump won the White House, profits plunged at certain properties, like the Doral golf resort in Miami. But the presidency also opened up new opportunities. Trump’s commercial and residential property portfolio morphed into a one-of-a-kind marketplace, through which anyone, anywhere, could pay the president of the United States. Hundreds of customers—including foreign governments, big businesses, and individual investors—obliged. The president's disregard for norms sparked a trickle-down ethics crisis with no precedent in modern American history. Trump appointed an inner circle of centimillionaires and billionaires—including Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Wilbur Ross, and Carl Icahn—who came with their own conflict-ridden portfolios. Following the president’s lead, they trampled barriers meant to separate their financial holdings from their government roles. White House, Inc. is a page-turning, hair-raising investigation into Trump and his team, who corrupted the U.S. presidency and managed to avoid accountability. Until now.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The chrisvossshow.com.

Hey, we're coming with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to see the video version of this. You can go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Foss. Hit that bell ding notification button so you get all the notifications of all the cool authors that we have. We have an amazing slew of authors on this

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podcasts and books as well be sure to find me on facebook forward slash chris voss. Today we have a most excellent author. He is on today with his new book, White House Incorporated, How Donald Trump Turned the Presidency into a Business. His name is Dan Alexander, and he is the senior editor of Forbes, where he leads the magazine's coverage of Donald Trump. Twice a year, poor Alexander is responsible for putting together Forbes. I put that in there. Forbes estimate of Donald Trump's net worth. Alexander won the 2018 ASME Next Award, given to magazine journalists under 30 who demonstrated extraordinary promise.

The New York City Society of Professional Journalists honored him with back-to-back awards for Best Business Feature of the Year 2017 and 2018. Born and raised in Ohio, he now lives in New Jersey. Alexander's reporting for Forbes has made an impact. His expose on the Eric Trump Foundation prompted the New York Attorney General to open an investigation in the organization. His work on Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross promoted additional inquiries. This explosive, rigorously reported book breaks new significant news about President Trump. And guess what? We have Dan here to tell us all about it. How are you doing, Dan? Doing great, thanks. Thank you for having me.

Awesome sauce. I ad-libbed your poorly... you for having me awesome sauce i i i had lived the uh you're poorly uh yeah you're you're did you ask for this job to oversee the trump account at forbes or did you funny that you say that so i i'd covered billionaires for years before i did trump's i was working on our you know on a rich list putting together the forbes 400 and the billionaires list and all that. And the Trump file was always one that everyone wanted to stay away from because, you know, Trump was so demanding and would call people up a million times and would say, you know, you've got all this wrong, you've got all that wrong, you know, I'm so much richer. And it was, you know, at the time he was, you know, a real estate guy who wasn't doing that much that was very entrepreneurial.

So there wasn't much that we could do in the way of stories about him. And so it was just basically a huge time suck. So I avoided the file for years. But then when he became president, then my assignment changed from covering hundreds of different billionaires to focusing just on one, Donald Trump. And so I have been doing that work now for the last couple of years. And it's more fun when you only have one of them and you really get to focus on it. That's pretty cool. You get to hyper-focus on it. What did you do wrong at work that they punished you?

No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. You can either go to Siberia or you can take this file. No, I'm just kidding. So the book has gotten wonderful praise, Maggie Haberman, the New York Times, and a bunch of other great people. And what motivated you to want to write the book? Because you're doing the file, of course.

What made you go, this needs to be in a darn book? Well, you know, I had written about Trump's business for a couple of years. And, you know, at Forbes, we take sort of a different approach because we're not, you know, we don't really do typical political coverage, you know, covering the race. We're not sending somebody around for all the campaigns. You know, we're not a politics magazine. We're a business magazine. And so our connection here really was, holy cow, we've got a guy that we've been covering for 30 some years, who's a billionaire right in our wheelhouse, who now is the President of the United States, and he's bringing that business with him into the White House. So we are sort of uniquely positioned to

cover what all happens there. And, you know, of course, we had no clue what was going to happen. But so for the last couple of years, you know, I've been digging into various parts of the business. And, you know, it's just story after various parts of the business. And, you know, it's just story after story that you find. It's like a lot of investigative reporting, you know, you turn over 10 rocks, under one of them, you find something. Trump's business, you turn over 10 rocks, under seven of them, you find something. It's just, it's amazing the amount of material that there is. And so after I had done, you know, two years, basically, of writing feature stories about Trump's business, we were sort of at a breaking point where I knew kind of what the missing links were,

and I knew the material that I had, and I knew what I could discover if I dug in. And if you added it all up, it got to something that was book length. And I'd never written a book before, and I was excited about the challenge. So I just dug in in and and here we are it's about a year and a half later so give us a from the upster sky view like a downward thing of the whole body and then let's get into the work of the book itself yeah so basically again i didn't want to write a political book. I wanted to write a business book about somebody who happens to be in politics. And it's a key distinction because what I try to do is start with the numbers. And then let the numbers tell you what the story is.

And rather than starting with an idea of the story and then looking for numbers that might fit that story. So in every case, it was, let's break out this part of the business or that part of the business and figure out all the data. So for instance, if you look at his commercial office buildings, so he holds over a billion dollars with the commercial office buildings, but nobody knew who was paying him rent. So that was one of the challenges was to dig in and figure out who all was paying the president of the United States rent and track down all those tenants and track down how much money they were paying. And then once you have that data, then you can sit there and say, all right, now what story does this data tell?

And you start to look around at the data and you see, you know, there and say, all right, now, what story does this data tell? And you start to look around at the data and you see, you know, there are four foreign government entities that are renting in Trump's buildings. There are 17 companies that are under federal investigation that are renting in his buildings. There are 30 companies that are federal contractors that are collecting more than $8 billion worth of contracts that are renting in his buildings. There are at least 35 tenants who are lobbying the federal government while they're paying the president rent, at least 20 of those lobbying the White House or the president directly. And so you add that all up and you say, okay, I started with the data. Now I've got the facts.

Now, what does that tell you? Well, what it tells you is that you've got this tangle of potential conflicts of interest that's unlike anything that the White House has ever seen. And that's just one example. So you march through each part of the business, you know, the DC Hotel, the golf portfolio, and, you know, you say, all right, well, what new data can we uncover here? So for instance, at the DC Hotel, you know, when I really started looking at the financials, I realized that this hotel that everybody thought was making all this money, here. So for instance, at the DC hotel, you know, when I really started looking at the financials, I realized that this hotel that everybody thought was making all this money and it was so successful because Trump was the president and all of the Republicans wanted to be at the hotel. You know, if you really dig into it, it didn't look like it was producing enough operating income

to be able to pay its interest expenses every year. So you've got this thing that everyone thinks is the symbol of Trump cashing in on the presidency, and in fact, bleeding money. And so it's another example, if you look at the numbers, find the numbers, and then you say, all right, well, what do those numbers tell you? And what it tells you in that case is that, yeah, Trump might be trying to cash in on the fact that he's president and that he owns this hotel, but it's been a bad business move. It's not working. And so you put all of that stuff together. And then after you look at Trump's business, then you sort of expand to the

inner circle and you say, all right, so, you know, if you look at any company, and again, think about it like a business story. If you look at any company, you know, there's always the question of what's the tone at the top, especially when there are problems in a company. You know, people look at the CEOo and say is the ceo setting an attitude that other people are then modeling that is creating a problem and if you look across the trump administration and in the various businesses that trump's deputies have continued to hold while they're in office and the conflicts that those present, it's a very clear story. You know, Trump, by deciding to hang on to his business, sparked a trickle-down ethics crisis throughout the federal government.

And you can see that with Ivanka Trump. You can see it with Jared Kushner. You can see it with Wilbur Ross. You can see it with Carl Icahn. And so ultimately, the idea is let's figure out all of the money flowing around the White House, and let's figure out what that story tells us and that's what the book does what i really love about the book too is like a lot of people

you know like if i'm trying to argue with the mega person which i don't but you know if i did um when you're you know you're you're going well he did this and they did this and you know that guy did this the great thing about your book is it's the numbers like you say it's very factual it's like stuff you can't really argue about because it's not a it's not really a spin it's just the numbers right yeah i mean a two is not a seven and a seven is not a nine i mean it isn't it isn't trump world but you know what i'm saying i mean you've got numbers and when you have them then there is no arguing about it and frankly i think i would feel uncomfortable doing traditional political

reporting where you were expected to uh if not make some value judgments uh balance judgments that one side might have against another side, I would find that very, very difficult to do and to do fairly. But if you just take numbers and you look at it as a business story, then you know and you can be confident in what those numbers tell you. And that allows you to tell the story more straightly. but when you find something that looks smelly you don't have to say oh it could be this it could be that no the qatar investment authority is paying the president of the united states money and we know how much money it is that's it's irrefutable so um so that that makes it i think a clearer story as you look at the whole body of what he's

done uh there's two reasons i think he never turned the business over to a private trust like most people have done that have been president. One is he didn't want people digging around the crimes he's got locked in the closet, the skeletons. And number two, he wanted to be able to use the presidency to grift. I think you guys have done the article that he's made $1.2 billion off of the presidency so far. Well, his revenue in his first two years was $1.2 billion while he was president. In the first three years, it was $1.9 billion, if you add all of that up. But one of the common misconceptions is that if he wanted to get rich on the presidency, and he has made efforts to profit from politics, there's no question, it was a bad business move. He's actually lost money since

he became president, despite trying to make money because of the presidency. So you have this thing where you both have, you know, the problematic ethics, but then you also have the problematic economics. And those two things, you know, at the start of but then you also have the problematic economics. And those two things, you know, at the start of the presidency, we didn't know how that would all shake out. But now, you know, now we've seen the experiment unfold. I think it's a warning to future billionaires who become president. Yeah, I don't think that we're done after Trump. Just look at the candidates in 2020. If you want a glimpse of the future um you know hold politics is so polarizing that if you lose half of your customers or turn off half of your customers

it's going to cost you a tremendous amount of money so if you want to do what's right for your political career it makes sense generally to get out of business but if you want to do what's right for your wallet it also makes sense to get out of business. Trump just miscalculated it. And he seems to have a pattern of miscalculation. Yeah, well, you know, he's not driven by the things that a lot of business people are driven by. And, you know, the question of why he hung on to his business, I don't actually think it's that complicated. I mean, you know, it's the same reason why he hasn't given his business over to his kids when he's a guy who's got a multibillion dollar fortune and he's in his mid-70s. I mean, I've covered hundreds of billionaires.

That is basically unheard of for somebody to not pass down any of their wealth because Uncle Sam's going to come get that when you pass away. And then your kids are going to be stuck with the hefty tax bill. It doesn't make any financial sense. But if you're a person who's motivated by control and driven by ego, then it makes perfect sense. And this seems to be in line with that. And in the book, you get into everything from the beginning, the art of the self-deal, the rise of Donald Trump,

Moscow money, inaugurating the billionaire-in-chief, bad lie, the truth behind Trump's golf game, cashing in all in the family. You know, it's just extraordinary when you look at the money that he's, you know, I'll meet Trumpers and like, well, he gave up his salary. And you're like, why would he give up his salary? Like anybody who's doing that? And you guys track just some amazing stuff in this. We talked about this pre-show. One of the things I've always, I saw when the New York Times story hit was they were saying,

you know, he owes, I think it's personal loans that are, that will come immediately due in a year or two for 400 million. But, you know, you guys came out and said he is worth positive. He's, I think it's 1.1 billion he owes in debt. And then he's, and then it makes him worth 2.5, I think. Is that correct? Yeah, that's right. And, and, you know, so the times didn't mess up. I mean, the times reported it correctly. As far as I know, I don't obviously have the tax documents. I'd love to have them, but, um, that, uh, that he has $421 million of personally guaranteed debt. The confusion was that then a lot of people took that and ran with it and said that that's his total debt. And that's not his total debt. We've got

the documents, we know what his total debt is. It's $1.1 billion. And so the personally guaranteed stuff presents its own challenges and complications and all of that. But when there's that much other debt, you can't just write that off either. The banks don't just let you walk away without paying it. Those are real obligations. But yeah, he also has significant assets. He's got $3.66 billion in assets. And doing somebody's net worth, it's a complicated math exercise. But at the end, it's pretty simple. It's just subtraction. You take the assets, $3.66 billion you subtract the liabilities, 1.1 billion, and it's net worth right now, we've got it at 2.5 billion. The crazy thing was, as you guys get into, you broke down his commercial real estate, his golf courses, you basically broke down all the

pieces of the chess piece. And you guys nailed down that a lot of his money comes from two properties. Is that correct? Yeah. So his most valuable holdings are these two buildings that nobody pays any attention to because they don't have his name on it and he doesn't have a majority control of it. But if you want to understand the money behind Donald Trump, you have to look at these two anonymous office buildings.

One called 555 California Street in San Francisco and another one called 1290 Avenue of the Americas in New York. And Trump owns a 30 percent interest in each of them. But that 30 percent interest is worth more than anything else that he owns, more than the D.C. hotel, more than Doral, more than Trump Tower, more than the Penthouse, more than the mansion, more than anything. And those buildings are incredibly profitable. And one of the reasons why those buildings have done well is because first they're managed by Vornado, which is a publicly traded real estate firm. And Stephen Roth, the CEO over there is very, very well regarded in the real estate industry. And by all accounts, very professional manager. And they've done a great job with these assets.

Trump does not manage them. That's probably why they're worth something. Well, truthfully, it does have something to do with it. They've been managed very, very well. They haven't been over leveraged. You know, the second part of it is that because Trump only owns 30 percent, there are some of the only assets in his portfolio that aren't branded Trump. So people don't know that he owns them. And, you know, I called up all the tenants in the buildings and even some of the tenants who are paying, you know, monthly rent don't realize that they're paying rent to the president of the United States because they just think that their landlords were nato and that they're in 1290 avenue america so they're in 555 california street because of that anonymity it hasn't suffered some of the

consequences that say a property like you know trump national dural has where a lot of those customers stopped coming because they were turned off by Trump's politics. Everyone's been looking at, at like, you know, the Trump tower and like, is there Russian, you know, guys buying condos that are funneling it. But you go into this really deep dive investigative journalism where you go out to the buildings. The, the funny thing I got a kick out of with the San Francisco building is he's always talking about how San Francisco is, you know, Pelosi's burning it to the ground and the city's worthless in California, you know, all that rhetoric. And here he is, this is his, this is his jewel in his crown. But tell us some of the stories about some of these, like the Qatar story was pretty cool. Well, so one of the big challenges

of the book, you know, which I referenced earlier, but was that no one knows who's paying Donald Trump rent. The federal disclosure laws have a bunch of loopholes in them. And probably the most egregious for this presidency is that although you have to disclose anyone who's paying you directly, even if it's only like $202, you have to list that on a federal ethics filing. If someone pays you through a shell company, then you don't have to disclose who's paying that shell company. You just have to disclose that the money is coming from the company. So what that means is that on Trump's disclosures, he discloses money coming from various shell companies, but he doesn't disclose who any of his tenants are. He doesn't say who's actually paying him the millions of dollars in

rent that he's collecting. And so the puzzle was to go through the properties and figure out what they're paying. And you can get to some of it through lending documents and that sort of thing. Some of it is pretty easy to get to because it's like retail space. You can just walk into the space and you can look at property records, figure out what the square footage is. You can talk to people in the market, figure out roughly what the price per square foot would be. You do an estimate, you call up the company and they say, you're close, but it's actually this. But where it was really tricky was with some of these large anonymous office

buildings. Of course, if you're a bank or a law firm, you know, you're not going to put Skadden Arps on the, you know, side of the building on the 43rd floor, you know. And so it's difficult to figure out who those tenants are. So the big breakthrough was I found a document that listed all of the tenants in the two hardest to access buildings, which are also the two most important buildings, that 555 California Street and 1290 Avenue in the Americas. And as I was looking through the list, you know, my jaw about dropped to the floor because I saw that on the 43rd floor of 555 California Street, one of the tenants listed was the Qatar Investment Authority,

which is a sovereign wealth fund out of Qatar, basically acts as an arm of the Qatari government. And I was really surprised to see it because I looked through a lot of this stuff and I had never seen them listed anywhere on the building. When I went to their website, they didn't list any office space in that building. There was no mention of it anywhere else. And so I booked a trip to California to go see if they were really there. And there's security at the bottom of the building. So it was difficult to get upstairs. But fortunately, there's a series of elevator banks. And in the elevator bank that happened to be the same one as the 43rd floor, there was also a co-working space on the 49th floor. So I rented a desk at the co-working space, which allowed me

to get past the security. And I took the elevator up to the co-working space. I dropped my book bag off, said hi to the people there, and then took the elevator back down to the 43rd floor to see what I would find. And when I walked off the elevator, you know, I took a left and there on the, there was glass doors. And so you could see through into the office and on the right side, there was a reception desk and behind it, down the wall, it said, sure enough, Qatar Investment Authority. So it was, you know, this is the moment where the document was coming to life. And still, there were a lot of red flags, one of which was that not only was the address not on the website or anything like that, but I ended up finding a directory at the

bottom of the building, and the Qatar Investment Authority wasn't even listed in that directory. Wow. So you've got this business here, but then it doesn't seem to be traceable. Then you start looking around and peering into the office, and there's no one there. A lot of the interior walls are glass as well, so you can see the conference rooms and that sort of thing. It's totally vacant. They have beautiful furniture, beautiful lattice work in the entryway uh the furniture doesn't look like anybody ever sat on the sofas on the welcome desk uh there is a plant i think it was

uh you know some flower or something like that it was like the color of of these wood shelves behind me totally brown it looked like nobody had touched the thing in five months. I knocked on the doors, nobody answered. I went back at a different time the next day thinking, well, you know, maybe they just work odd hours, knocked on the doors again. Again, nobody answered. Ended up speaking with somebody in the building who said that after construction, he never once saw anyone go in or out of that office.

And so you sort of start connecting the dots and you say, okay, so we have a foreign government renting space in Donald Trump's most valuable building. No one knows that they're doing that. And it doesn't look like there's any clear business purpose behind that lease. So what else might be going on here? And then you look into, all right, well, what's happening with U.S. Qatari policy? And that's where it starts to get extremely suspicious about what was motivating this whole deal. Yeah, even I thought back when that went down where you know he calls

them out as a terrorist thing and i'm like what and then he switches he does the big switch and i'm like that boy got paid somehow like somebody there was some money and so when i heard that story i went oh well there you go connect the the dots. I mean, this is extraordinary. It was stunning when he accused the Qataris of funding terrorists. And then no one could really make sense of it when, you know, just a few months later, he totally does a 180 and thanks them for helping funding, for help fighting against terrorism funding. And in that intervening period is when the Qatar Investment Authority takes the office lease. You know, you have to wonder if ISIS doesn't get around to just buying an office building in San Francisco for them. And, you know, one thing that's important to remember with all of this stuff

is, you know, we don't know for sure. Like, you know, we don't have a napkin where the Qataris write on it. Hey, we rent office space. You change policy. You know, that's not there. The federal ethics rules are in place so that then no one has to wonder what's going on in somebody's head, you know, why somebody's making a decision and whether their personal financial interest is motivating that or whether the country's interests are motivating that. And by hanging on to his businesses, Trump left that door open

where people were going to wonder. And particularly with someone like him, who's so transactional, it raises a lot of questions about everything that he does that intersects in some way with his business. One of the tragedies of this is it's not just that U.S. policy might be influenced by Trump's own finances. It's that, let's say that it's not in that, you know, U.S. policy might be influenced by Trump's own finances. It's that, let's say that it's not in a particular instance, okay? Let's say that he changes his mind or he makes a decision that, and he's not factoring in his own financial interest into that calculus. The fact that he has these conflicts means that even if he is acting with the best of intentions and even if he makes the right decision, whatever he decides, the credibility of that decision is going to be undermined. And so if you don't like Trump's policies, then, of course, this is all of these financial interests are troubling because you wonder whether they're motivating those policies. But even if you do like Trump's policies,

these financial interests are troubling because they undermine the credibility of your candidate and of the policies that you support. We saw that with the hydrochloric win. You know, there was, I think somewhere someone's found he's got a little bit of investment. Then you have to wonder if there's any money going to shell companies and different things. You know, I'm pretty familiar. I mean, I'm not familiar from there, but I understand what goes on down south there in the Virgin Islands and the different islands that you can hide stuff in. And you have to wonder if he's just got money sitting in an account somewhere that's due to him

after he leaves the presidency, trust funds, et cetera, et cetera. What's interesting is you can also get into everything about his business, but his broken promises with his ethics and everybody, all the pirates that surround him, his pledges to do different things. And then his 2020 money for how he shifted millions into his campaign donors, into his private business. I mean, this has been extraordinary what they've done there. Yeah. You know, it's one of those situations where you're just sort of left scratching your head. You might remember that when Trump first said that he was going to run for office in 2015, the summer of 2015, you know, part of his initial stump speech was, I'm really rich.

You know, I don't need anybody's money. I'm going to pay for all this myself. And he did put a lot of his own money into his 2016 campaign initially. He ends up putting $66 million into the campaign. But before he wins the Republican nomination, it was mostly funded by Trump. Now, after he wins the nomination, he then breaks that promise to self-funded and he does start raising a tremendous amount of money from outsiders. But then the really strange thing is that once he takes office and he declares that

he's going to run for reelection in 2020 on the day that he takes office, which is unusual. Usually people wait a year and a half or two and a half years or something like that. But Trump on day one says, I'm running in 2020. And what that allows is it allows his campaign to continue doing campaign things, including paying various vendors. Some of those vendors are Trump owned companies. And the really strange thing is that after promising to fund his own 2016 campaign, and then sort of backing away from that promise toward the end of the campaign, then he doesn't put a dollar into his reelection campaign. I mean, there are hundreds of American billionaires who are pouring money into both Trump's campaign and Biden's campaign. And one of the billionaires who has not donated anything is the president himself. It's incredible. But meanwhile, while he's not donating anything, you know, his companies have

continued to charge money to the campaign. And so the effect is that other people's donations, because none of that money in the coffers came from him, becomes revenue for the Trump organization. And some of these expenses seem fairly typical. So like, for instance, they rent space in Trump Tower. There are questions in basically every case where how much space are they renting? We don't know. Are they paying fair market rates? We don't know.

They say that they are, but it's hard to do an independent assessment of that because we don't actually know how much space it is. So it's difficult to know whether the rate is fair. But some of them are just very confusing. So for instance, one Trump organization company is charging the campaign for legal and IT expenses. Now, why, and it's a management company. Now, why would a management company, why would a presidential campaign need a management company of a real estate firm to handle the campaign's IT? It just doesn't, it doesn't smell right. And it's such a small amount of money. You know, it's he's ended up moving about two point three million dollars of campaign donor money into his business.

Wow. And, you know, that's a big number for for most of us, of course. But, you know, if you're worth two and a half billion dollars, two point three million dollars is not a ton of money. And so you would think that Trump, just for the optics of it, you know, would say, you know, and I'm going to cover this, you know, I'll pitch in whatever my companies are charging, you know, I'll make an equivalent donation. That way, you know, I can't be charged of getting rich off of my campaign donors. But Trump hasn't done that and still hasn't put anything in. And it all calls back to, you know, years ago, back before he actually did mount a serious

campaign when he was flirting with one of his earlier, you know, presidential runs. He told Fortune magazine, he said, you know, I'm going to be the first person to run for president and actually make money on it. And that was not true in 2016 because he spent his own money. But this year, the campaign has made him money. Now, business is complicated. And so he's lost money in plenty of other ways. And net-net, he's down. But the campaign itself has, has added money to his, to his business.

That was the question I had you for you falling back to those two properties that are those main properties. If he didn't have those two properties, would he be solvent? Well, yes. But he would be in very, very troubled position. So the net value of those two properties, and this is off the top of my head, so I might have it off a little bit, but I think we have it right now at about $750 million of net value that he has in those two assets. So if his, you know, if his fortune is at two and a half billion, then that means that he'd be at, you know, closer to, you know, 1.8 or something like that without those two properties. He does have some other properties that are fairly lightly leveraged that are in a good position. So 40 Wall Street is an example of that. Actually, Trump Tower is in pretty good

position. He makes $13.1 million net operating income per year on Trump Tower, and his interest expenses are only $4.2 million. So he can clear money there. So Doral is a golf resort, but it's really a hotel. You know, it's a 643 room hotel with four golf courses next to it. The Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. is a hotel. Those properties are really, really in rough shape because that's where his brand is most important. And as his brand has polarized 50 percent of its potential customers. Those businesses have been really troubled. Whereas for instance, like an office lease, you know, which typically those office leases might be 10 years or something like that. If you're at the end of your lease, sure. You might decide that you want to move out of the Trump building,

but you're probably not going to just quit on, you know, January 21st, 2017. Whereas if you're picking a golf resort to go to you you might make that decision so the the uh hotels and golf courses got hit first then it sort of rippled through to the commercial stuff but the commercial stuff's doing better than anything um do you think if he loses the presidency uh that's gonna make you hit to his value i mean i think if he loses the presidency, it's going to be good for his business. And I'll tell you why. So he, there are certain restrictions that he put himself under that he has not fully followed, but that he is sort of followed. So

one of these examples is that he promised that he wasn't going to do any new foreign deals when he was in office. Now, he did not fall in. He ended up selling land in the Dominican Republic in 2018. That is the definition of a new foreign deal. But he has not done a large skyscraper on some far flung skyline, you know, where he has a licensing deal and he's trying to pull, you know, 30 or $50 million out of that property. If he's no longer president, he's able to do that again. The Trumps, when he took office, thought that they were going to be able to take that model of overseas licensing and import it to middle city markets in the United States,

you know, Nashville, Columbus, Ohio, Austin, you know, sort of mid-market sort of stuff where Trump might have more fans. And they talked a big game about it at the start, and then none of those properties came to fruition. So that meant that that branding business was totally cut off. You know, he also, the apprentice was real money. And by deciding to run, he cut off that stream because, you know, federal regulations are such that you cannot, as a candidate, receive an unequal amount of airtime on non-news programs than other candidates. And by hosting his own TV show, Trump would have been violating that from day one. So he had to give up the TV show as soon as he decided that he was going to run for president. So all of that income stream goes

away. Now, I don't know if they're going to fire back up to The Apprentice again, but I wouldn't be surprised if some network or some reality thing or whatever would be willing to pay Trump, pick a number, $5 million a year to be on some show. So that could provide real money that he's not able to get right now. You know, he can do speaking and collect fees. You know, the Clintons, you know, collected over $200 million after they left the White House in author fees and speaking fees. That's real money. So I just think that he's going to have more options with what to do once he's out of office.

And some of this brand tarnishing that he's done might wear off a little bit. People might not be quite as angry once he's a historical figure rather than the sitting president of the United States. Might be, yeah. Or I think it's,

is it the History Channel or A&E who has those prison shows where they do the thing? Him and William Barr, they can do like a prison show when they're in prison. But no, you're right. I mean, I've often wondered.

I mean, I wonder how popular he's going to be after. And I guess that depends on how many dead bodies and skeletons financially we find in the thing. I don't know if you guys got into this in the book because it's an extraordinary book. You got into a lot of great details. But I don't know if you got into this. It was when they redid the tax code at the beginning of his administration, they favored a lot of LLCs,

which people, as you know, people who own real estate are famously for LLCs. I've owned a lot of companies, created a lot of corporations and stuff. So I understand what an LLC is, what a C-Corp is, all that sort of stuff. But a lot of people and stuff. So I understand, you know, what an LLC is, what a C Corp is, all that sort of stuff. But a lot of people don't. But when they made the distinction in the tax code, did that vastly increase his net worth? So Trump's taxes, of course, are a podcast episode of its own. Trump, in 2005, the front page of Trump's tax returns leaked. And so we knew what his earnings were then. This is before the New York Times got the recent tax return data.

If you just look at that year and you look at what the types of income that he was making at that time, basically everything that you could, every type of income that you could push into being passed through income, you were going to save about 10 percent in taxes on that. So Trump, based on that year's return, would have saved about $10 million a year, $11 million a year, which is real money, of course. Now, the thing that's important to remember here is that if you're declaring year after year after year that you have no income or that you have huge losses, then the rate that you pay on that income isn't that significant. You know, I mean, if you're only paying $750 in federal income tax, then, you know, it's immaterial what, you know, what the rate is, because you're just saying that you've lost, you know, a ton of money. One part that undoubtedly did help him, although not as

much as he would have liked, was, you know, was for years he's been railing against the estate tax. And as somebody who inherited a large fortune and is poised to turn over a large fortune, it makes sense that he wouldn't like the estate tax. This is when you die basically over a certain threshold. now, it's like $22 million. The federal government takes 40% of what's left. And so for a guy like Trump, you know, who might be ready to pass down two and a half billion dollars, that would be a massive tax bill for his kids. And so had he been able to eliminate the estate tax, which he was pushing for. That would have been the best business deal of his life. But he wasn't able to get it done. It was too much for Congress's stomach. And so what they did instead was they increased the limit on where you basically got it tax-free. So it had been something like $11 million. They doubled it to something like $22 million.

Again, it's five and a5 per person. If it's a couple, it's $11. Now, with a couple, it's $22 million. So now, if you are worth $22 million, you can pass on your fortune without the estate tax. But for Trump, who's got a fortune that's way over $22 million, that ends up saving his heirs a few million bucks. But it's not the nearly billion-dollar savings that he would have gotten had he been able to eliminate the thing altogether. If the IRS calls back that 100 million, is he in trouble? Yeah, he is. So we estimate right now that his cash pile is $160 million. So he could pay $100 million, but then you've got $60 million of cash on a business that, you know, has $3.66 billion in assets that is bleeding money out of several of its companies, particularly during the coronavirus. So, you know, just at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.,

the Times tax returns show that from 2016 to 2018, that building declared tax losses, which is a little bit different here. So these numbers are going to be bigger than they would be otherwise, but tax losses of $55.5 million. Now, I don't think that their operating losses are nearly that much money, but nonetheless, they are losing money. You know, if you take the operating profit or losses that they have and you subtract out the interest, there's no question that they're losing money at that property. So they're having to pump money into various properties that are pouring fortunes into these European golf properties that they have. So if you're suddenly down to $60 million, all of a sudden it gets pretty precarious. Um, you know, you can't, uh, you know, you can't bail out your companies forever. And even if you have to do things like refinance, uh, you know, you gotta pay the bankers big fees to refinance. And, you know,

if you want to do a $400 million loan, it's going to be tough to hand over, you know, $6 million in fees or something like that. So it would, it would put a lot of pressure on him. If he is careful, you know, he can, he can get out of this cash crunch and these impending liabilities that he has by, you know, refinancing his properties. And frankly, by selling a lot of the vanity stuff, it doesn't make any business sense. You know, sell the mansions that you haven't gone to in 10 years. I mean, who cares, you know? But he, and they've done some of that, but they still own a lot of it.

And that doesn't seem to make a ton of sense. You know, the penthouse in Trump Tower is worth, we've got it at $45 million. You know, he spent like three nights there in the last four years and he just moved his domicile to Florida. So, you know, why not sell the thing for $45 million? Use that cash, you know,

to then help pay down some of the debts that you have. And if they did that and they did, you know, a bunch of refinancing and sold other properties, they could get out of this thing all right. But there's always the question of ego and whether he'd be willing to part with the greenhouse, whether he'd be willing to part with an asset like Mar-a-Lago, that sort of thing. And you've got an update on a new article you just put out. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Sure. Yeah. So I was analyzing the loans that the portfolio has overall. And if you just look, if he's reelected, then in his second term, he's going to have to, his businesses are going to have to pay back $900 million of liabilities while he's in office.

Now, I want to be clear here, because I think that a lot of times with big numbers like that, people can jump to the wrong conclusions. He can pay that back if he is very careful. You know, if he does some of the things we were just talking about, sell the dumb assets, sell the planes that you don't use, you know, sell the mansions you don't visit, you know, take a couple of, you know, hits, like get rid of Mar-a-Lago because it's a really valuable property that doesn't throw off enough cash to justify what its valuation is. And then do a lot of refinancing. Then he can be okay. The trick here is that not just the ego question of whether he would be willing to do that. But also, when you have that much debt to rework, there are basically two ways that you're going to do it. One is you're going to sell off

a bunch of stuff. Two is you're going to refinance things. And the more likely is that you're going to do a combination of the two. But if you have to do these refinancings, you're going to Wall Street and you're saying to Wall Street banks, your administration is regulating and in many cases investigating, hey, would you be willing to lend me hundreds of millions of dollars? And you're going to be putting up for sale major properties and opening them up to anybody to say, hey, would you pay me tens of millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars? And any of those transactions, whether they're sales or whether they're refinancings, raise enormous conflict questions

because you have to wonder whether the bank is doing the loan because they like the structure or whether they're doing the loan because the guy on the other end of it happens to be pursuing an investigation into their bank. And in the same case, if somebody buys a property, you have to wonder whether they're purchasing the property because they like that asset or whether they're purchasing the property because they want to pour money into the pockets of the president. There's one rumor going on that, and it's been, I think, reported that Rupert Murdoch is aware of this. And they're kind of concerned that, you know, he'll go by OANN and start a media company. They've already, you know, put it in the app and they've got their own little media company they're starting to do. Um, and that could be a moneymaker if you

build a Fox competitor, I suppose. Donald Trump's great on television. I mean, that's what he did before he was in politics. That's why he was so successful in politics. People love watching the guy. He, even if you don't like him him he's fascinating to watch on television uh so certainly uh you know it's not it's not a ridiculous um idea uh but you know i haven't i haven't seen you know the documented evidence that they're for sure going to do it but it wouldn't surprise me the um one last fun question for you because i grew up in the era i mean i actually idolized donald trump in 1986 when our deal came out and i was you know 20 year old coming into business to be a stock broker and so i i you know i thought i bought whatever the crap was sold in that book and then of course 1989 1990 i think it was he put out a book that's now been taken back uh called surviving

i think uh and it was about you know basically just admits all the stuff that he failed in New Orleans and how he negotiated with the banks and stuff. And but do you think that there was a story that came out, stories that came out about the original Forbes guy who'd put him on the list and he had like the tapes and stuff of the fake PR agent calling him up going donald trump's worth this much and and he kind of strong-armed himself onto the forbes list where forbes just went finally i if i recall this you correct me if i'm wrong um i've heard the story you know they're just like just put them on the damn list or something i don't know if forbes

had never done that will we be in the position we are? Is it all Forbes' fault? First of all, let me correct your version of the pencil. So what happened was Trump, one of the most difficult things when you're doing billionaire files and trying to figure out fortunes, is how fortunes split up within families. Because you can see what the assets are, but you don't necessarily know when they're being passed down. And you don't know the methods through which they're being passed down. And so that is a very tricky thing to figure out how to split everything up.

And the mistake that Jonathan Greenberg, the guy who was working on it, made, and to his credit, dug up and outed himself on, was that Trump claimed that the assets were – first of all, he said – he convinced Greenberg that he had 50% and his dad had 50%. Well, in a family where you've got more than one kid, that doesn't make any sense at all. But he convinced him of that. And then he convinced him that basically all of Fred's fortune had been passed to Donald. And so eventually Fred falls off the list. In the initial list, Fred and Donald were on together, which they shouldn't have been. It should have just been Fred. And then afterward, he consolidated it all to Donald, which also wasn't right. So that was sort of an original sin, if you will.

But one thing that's interesting is that Trump does end up inheriting, obviously a lot of the money eventually. And he also does, you know, do a couple of deals that are very successful. You know, Trump tower was actually a tremendously successful deal. And the 40 wall street deal was really successful. And the deal that eventually, you know, landed him with 1290 Avenue of the Americas and 555 California Street, you know, those four deals really account for those in the inheritance and count for really most of his fortune, throw the apprentice on there too.

But he, you know, when he's in Atlantic City, he ends up negotiating with these banks to get them to basically eat a lot of the money that he owed them. And, you know, so he, he actually comes out of that and all of a sudden is able to, uh, justify actually being on the list himself. So, um, so we, you know, we had it, uh, we had it wrong at first. And you do your best each year. And I can tell you, having spent about two months on it, every single year for the last three years, there is no one whose finances we understand better than Donald Trump. And I'm extremely confident that we've got it correct now. There's a lot of people who like to say he's not a billionaire,

and they are wrong. Yeah, well, this is what you guys have been doing forever. I mean, you guys know this game. It's one of these things where, you know, a lot of people who are Trump critics like to criticize the president and his supporters for promoting conspiracy theories that fly in the face of the data. And, you know, this idea that he is not a billionaire, the data just doesn't back it up. You know, I mean, we can take you through all the net operating income of all those properties, what the liabilities are, and,

you know, show you every single data point for every single property and how it all adds up. And when people try to argue that he's not a billionaire, they just sort of throw their hands up and say, well, he must not be. And that is conspiracy. That's been some of the other things that I've been kind of bugged about when news reporting has been, you know,

well, he has $400,000 in in debt and people think that that's like his thing and i keep telling people about the forbes article you guys put out at the time where he was 2.5 yeah i think in net value and then or his his gross value and then and then uh at 1.1 so he's still i don't know he's he's three and something and then he's 2.5 in the end yeah yeah and and so i'm always like and people are running around like he's broke ass like he's leveraged over his he's not one of the things that really helped him was i don't remember what the multiple was but when they sold all the atlantic city and the dying dead properties to that junk bond investment vehicle yep i think it was like 4 or 25 times the value that they they gave him i don't know that particular one that you're talking about but

you know he he did some amazing uh houdini acts in atlantic city yeah they bankrupted that thing like four times i think before they finally threw him and the family off the board that's when i was watching that and went yeah this guy uh so there you go guys uh conversation with dan alexander uh on his book white house incorporated how donald trump turned the business into presidency or i'm sorry oh donald i mean seriously i mean you can go either way with that how donald trump turned the presidency into a business uh and he gets into all the details and the thing i love about this book is it's it's not opinion man it's like you say it's the data it's the money it's inarguable it's there and everything else and you guys have been you know studying this research on this gentleman forever um so uh thanks for being on the show, Dan.

We certainly appreciate you coming on. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you very much. Check out the book. Is there a.com you want people to go to, or do you just want them to check you out at Forbes? Yeah, just check it out on Forbes and pick up the book. There you go.

Grab the book at your local booksellers, Amazon.com or wherever. To my audience, thanks for tuning in. Be sure to subscribe to the show. Go to YouTube.com, 4chassch chris voss hit that bell notification button the cvpn.com or chris voss podcast network you subscribe to online podcasts go to goodreads.com for us chris voss and check us out there thanks for tuning in be well stay safe register to vote we'll see you next time thanks