Trump is, at the time, in the midst of building Trump Estates in the UAE, a development of more than a hundred “luxury villas” that will overlook a Trump-branded golf course to be named Trump International Golf Club Dubai.120
In less than forty-eight months, the new Trump-branded Turnberry property—Trump Turnberry—will lose $39 million despite Trump’s $130 million in improvements (he will later claim $260 million, while his project manager will insist it was $181 million).121 Nevertheless, by August 2018 Trump will announce that in addition to the $130 million (up to $260 million) he has already invested in his money-losing operation at Turnberry, he will now invest an additional $200 million in his other Trump-branded golf course in Scotland, Trump Aberdeen.122 Quartz will call Trump’s investments in golf properties in Scotland “a string of investments … that appear to make little business sense” and have consistently performed “terribly.”123 With Trump Aberdeen losing $9.2 million in its first six years of operation—2012 to 2018—and Trump Turnberry losing $39 million from 2014 to 2018, the Atlantic will note in August 2018 that the source of funds for Trump’s planned improvements on these properties is a “mystery.”124
Whereas, prior to 2006—around the time Felix Sater became Trump’s fixer for real estate investments in Russia—the historically illiquid Trump denominated himself the “King of Debt,” from that year on he inexplicably finds himself able to pay for all his projects, including his two Scottish golf courses, in cash.125 The Atlantic reports that “onlookers have struggled to explain both this new [investment] model [for Trump] and Trump’s Scottish projects.” According to Adam Davidson of the New Yorker, Trump’s purchase of Turnberry from the Emiratis is, from a business standpoint, “a bizarre, confounding move that raises questions about the central nature of his business during the years in which he prepared for and then executed his presidential campaign.”126 Davidson will observe, in a July 2018 report on Turnberry, that Trump’s investment in the golf course “is so much bigger than his other recent projects that it would not be unreasonable to describe the Trump Organization as, at its core, a manager of a money-losing Scottish golf course that is kept afloat with funds from licensing fees and decades-old real-estate projects.”127
Davidson’s assessment—which includes the notation that, even at a staggering discount, the purchase of Turnberry from the Emiratis consumed “more than half of the [Trump Organization’s] available cash”—is bolstered by the small amount of data publicly available on the Trump Organization’s finances.128 The Wall Street Journal finds that from January 2014 through June 2015, the pretax income for the entire Trump Organization was $160 million—an approximately $106 million annual income before taxes—yet during this period Trump was, by his own accounting, in the midst of a four-year, $260 million investment in Trump Turnberry and gearing up for an investment, in 2018, of $197 million at Trump Aberdeen.129 All told, just these two investments—in a pair of golf courses in Scotland—add up to over 400 percent of the annual pretax revenue of the Trump Organization during the period assayed by the Wall Street Journal.
Incredibly, Trump’s planned $197 million investment in Trump Aberdeen is just a down payment on a much larger investment: according to the Atlantic, in order to get permission to construct any additions at all to the Aberdeen property, Trump had to “promise [to] … spend $1.3 billion on two golf courses, a luxury hotel and hundreds of homes” on the site.130 Even with that figure thereafter being dialed back to $971 million, there remains no explanation for how, absent massive loans, Trump could possibly afford the development he was planning in Aberdeen at the time of his inauguration in 2017.131 Based on publicly available data, Trump should have been hundreds of millions of dollars short of being able to afford the announced project in Scotland, even if the Trump Organization were to pause all its other real estate investments and pending projects. It is little surprise, then, that the New Yorker concludes in 2018 that “it is hard to understand where all of the money spent on Turnberry came from.”132
In May 2018, Eric Trump will insist to the Washington Post that the Trump Organization’s odds-defying budgeting is the result of “incredible cash flow” from existing sources.133 The Post will express some incredulity about the claim, noting Trump’s “string of commercial bankruptcies” at the time the Trump Organization was spending lavishly in Scotland as well as “the Great Recession’s hammering of the real estate industry.”134 And indeed Eric Trump’s