How Donald Trump Made Billions From Politics

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

69% : A week later, Trump welcomed Wes Moss and Andy Litinsky, former Apprentice contestants, to his private club for a business pitch.
68% : onald Trump has built his entire brand around being a winner.
65% : When Trump fails, he doesn't give up -- he just finds a new pitch, and often a new audience.
61% : n October 20, 2021, about two weeks after he fell off The Forbes 400, Trump again played host to his apprentices at Mar-a-Lago.
59% : At the time Trump left office, he was worth an estimated $2.4 billion, down from roughly $4.5 billion the day he announced his 2016 campaign in the Trump Tower atrium.
56% : In early 2021, Forbes estimated that Trump was worth $2.4 billion, with $1.4 billion tied up in traditional commercial property, $1 billion of that concentrated in New York City.
56% : When Forbes visited him at Trump Tower a few months later, on a day that coincided with a huge crowd heavy on pious Latinos waiting to see Pope Francis parade by, Trump was booed loudly.As he reshaped a brand known for luxury into one defined by divisiveness, such derision came at a cost: Operating profit dropped from an estimated $184 million in 2015 to $141 million in 2017.
53% : Ditching the shares anyway would be a deceitful move, but also one that could enable Trump to lock in the first billion-dollar payoff from politics in U.S. history, potentially cementing his long-term spot on The Forbes 400, a list he has obsessed over since its first edition in 1982.
51% : Some old-timers did not love the change and decided to leave, which actually benefited Trump.
50% : They were, in essence, just taking Trump himself public.
50% : But given that Trump invested next to nothing in the venture, he remains way ahead.
48% : Trump currently has an estimated $413 million of liquid assets on his balance sheet after selling a hotel in D.C. and a golf course in New York.
44% : Just as politics changed Trump, he changed poli­tics, rewriting the rules for how to squeeze profits from the presi­dency.
42% : Freed from the White House, Trump centered his orbit in Mar-a-Lago and invited those who could write checks rumored to be approaching $1 million to join the extravaganza.
41% : Shareholders hardly blinked, bidding up shares of the merged company the moment it started trading, on March 26, under the ticker DJT -- the same symbol Trump used for the publicly traded casino company that he twice bankrupted.
40% : But no one has cashed in the way, or on the scale, that Trump has.
38% : Eight months after his presidency ended, Trump officially dropped off The Forbes 400 for the first time in 25 years.
34% : If someone other than Trump were behind the company, investors would probably peg it near zero.
33% : Under giant chandeliers, Trump and Orlando signed docu­ments setting up a SPAC deal that would merge Orlando's publicly traded pile of cash with Trump's private enterprise, prepping the Trump Media & Technology Group to go public despite hardly having an operating business.
29% : Trump would get 90% of the equity -- and, according to someone involved in the deal, did not have to invest a thing upfront.
28% : Defeated by voters, then impeached a second time after the Capitol riot he had fomented, Trump arrived back in Palm Beach, Florida, to an empire in distress.
27% : What's Trump really selling?

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