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For those that don't want to click through: He is on the hook personally for hundreds of millions of dollars in debt that will come due next few years during his potential second term with no obvious way of paying it off. There's no way of knowing who has control of it.

Edit: and also from the thread, he owes > $1 Billion in total to lenders.

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How can anyone seriously support him being in a position of power if this is true. The opportunity to buy that debt and call it as leverage to extract political gain is so easy and obvious. Does any of this debt trade on any market? If so a hedge fund could basically have puppet strings on the federal government.

Simple: it is not “true” to those who support him. They are told a completely different story - one of a successful businessman with unbending will, unfairly persecuted by the media, here to manifest God’s plan.

Yes, including that last one. Talk to any fundamental Christian on why.

I am absolutely positive that they will vote for him even if he publicly endorses Biden himself.

You are down-voted though absolutely 100% right

> The opportunity to buy that debt and call it as leverage to extract political gain is so easy and obvious

If this happened, you don't think he'd be able to get another institution (or GOP constituent) to re-finance/backstop his debt for him?

2-300m in debt is a lot but his businesses pull in 4-500m in annual revenue. It's not a crazy debt-to-income ratio.

First of all, as president he shouldn't have any private business interests. Second, under all standard policies, he wouldn't get the most basic security clearance with this fact pattern. Third, saying some other institution or GOP constituent could backstop is PART OF THE PROBLEM, then he is beholden to them, how is that a solution. Fourth, he deliberately withheld this information as part of a years long cover up, contrary to all prior norms, and we now know why, that alone should disqualify him from office. How much tribal blindness are we willing to accept in politics at this point?

You bring up many good points, none of which I strongly disagree with.

My only point was that it's not "easy and obvious" to "buy his debt and use it as leverage to extract political gain". There are many "outs" he can take if such an event occurred.

I started my career as a lawyer in 2008. I specialized on corporate bankruptcies and worked on many of the high profile cases we all read about. I can tell you I saw this first hand. I saw a hedge fund by a loan from a small community bank for $150k and use it to gum up the works and extract $50M. I guarantee Trump is at high risk of danger here. The legal system can absolutely be weaponized and with over $1B of debt there’s no way to know who owns every dollar. The thing is what if money isn’t what they demand? You’re assuming that they will accept payment of their debt. But with leverage comes opportunities for other demands. It’s actually terrifying to think of all of the things one could demand from a president or government under these circumstances. Absolutely insane.

Commercial real estate loans are often non recourse. You lend to the holding company who owns the property. If it fails you don’t necessarily have a claim on the owners of that company.

And I would expect covid to have decimated the value of commercial real estate, particularly hotels.

This is briefly discussed in the NYT article. Apparently some of the loans are borrowed against his personal holdings.

That may be the case but I would be surprised the NYT would know, unless they have seen the terms of the loan.

No. Recourse loans are listed on tax filings separately from non-recourse. The personal guarantee means it shows up on personal income statements. So no other records are needed.

Nope, we're talking about personal loans, personally guaranteed by him. No intermediary, no holding company.

Because it's so easy to play asset stripping games, personal guarantees are very common in the commercial real estate world.

What is his net worth? I didn't see it in the article.

Whether or not his debts are an issue really depends on how much wealth he has to back it up.

The article is based on income tax returns which only deal with income and don't show net worth.

Then how can they claim his personal loans put him at risk?

If you have $500M in loans due, but $1B in the bank, it’s not really a problem is it?

But there's no indication presented this won't all be easily re-financeable, rolled over as most corporate debt is.

True except that this article will make it more challenging given a greater whole picture of his finances for financiers.

You mean other than all of the past problems getting credit which forced him to seek out foreign funding in the first place? His businesses lose money and having so many bankruptcies where his partners have been left holding the bag is going to deter most bankers unless they have other ways to recoup their money.

Here’s an old report about his credit rating - note the “likely to default”:

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/trumps-business-credit-...

Here’s an example of what it took for him to get loans in the past:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/business/deutsche-bank-do...

The only bank that was lending to him, deutsche bank, literally had a board meeting and investigation to determine how he was able to bypass internal controls and get more loans after they had halted lending to him (he basically got the private wealth division to keep going after the commercial division said no more). If that is the most favorable lender left, future loans from anyone seem unlikely.

Is that a net position? I am not interested enough in the further details to try to figure it out for myself, but his net position is more important than the total debt.

Net 2.5b

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2020/09/28/yes-don...

Thanks. So according to that analysis, Trump has plenty of debt, and also plenty of resources to manage it.

Hard to value his type of commercial real estate outside of an actual sale though.

He has had recent trouble selling his properties for the asking price. He put up Trump International (the DC hotel) on the market in Oct. 2019 for $500M. There were no buyers at that price before he took it off the market due to covid-19.

There is no indication that he has the resources to finance the debt. Nor is there indication that he does not have those resources. We simply do not know either way until a better picture of his finances comes out.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-organization-exploring-sa...

But he has 3.5b in assets. So that gives him about a 2.5b net worth. He can pay it.

Does he though? He valued one property as $200M that was then later valued at $18M. He has a well documented history of inflating value estimates. He even claimed Trump Tower had more floors than it does (something so easy to count). So I would not just take the valuations at face value.

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