Here’s a feel-good story for the beginning of 2022! Forbes reports that even though the golf industry has seen a boom during the pandemic, Donald Trump’s European golf interests have tanked to the tune of $100-plus million. It’s almost like the guy who has reportedly squandered hundreds of millions of unearned capitol numerous times over the last five decades continues to be terrible at everything he does.
It is almost a talent to be as bad at business as Donald Trump is. You could probably run an organization better by making binary decisions using a goldfish’s location in a fishbowl. According to Forbes, the issue for Trump is that his golf courses in Europe are tied to large-scale resorts, and so while tee times increased at golf courses all over the world, people booking “resort” time decreased sharply—you know, global pandemic and all that.
One of the shiniest objects on the list is Trump’s money pit investment in the Turnberry golf resort in Scotland. Turnberry was reportedly purchased for more than $60 million back in 2014. Trump then poured upwards of 200 million into the place and has only taken one loss after another. Turnberry under Trump has yet to do anything but bleed money, and the pandemic—and even “a $3.2 million Covid-related grant through the British government,” did not stop them from losing $4.7 million in the last year and a half. Since taking over the resort, Turnberry has lost almost $70 million.
In fact, all of Trump’s golf resorts throughout Europe have consistently taken losses every year leading up to the pandemic. The pandemic doesn’t seemed to have done much of anything to change the trajectory of what was clearly a bad investment by a bad business man. That, of course, is if Trump’s plan was to actually do business in the first place.
The most money Trump’s gold resorts seem to have made over the past few years were directly connected to Trump spending about a third of his entire presidency playing golf. Secret Service, diplomats, and dignitaries have to sleep somewhere—and ride around in golf carts.
Back in 2018, The New Yorker ran a story by Adam Davidson that asked a lot of questions about Donald Trump’s move of borrowing large loans and flipping places to spending tons of “his” own “cash” on real estate projects like Turnberry. As Davidson writes, organized crime and other criminal entities like to launder money by way of throwing down cash on real estate. Golf courses offer up large laundering options. Are the losses Trump’s European properties taking Trump’s losses, or just a part of doing the business of being the single most obviously corrupt elected official of the last few years? Hard to say.
Maybe Trump’s previous bankruptcy judge secretly left the Trump organization with a treasure map into the dragon Smaug’s Lonely Mountain?
Article reprinted with permission from Daily Kos
