And from the article I was thinking “Yeah - it would be easy enough for some foreigner to write a check for $500,000 for his one night and mark it as “hotel accommodations”. But in your post you highlight that would be taken into account as a profit.
BTW - I thought all foreigners hated Trump./s Why would they want to give him money, much less stay in a hotel with his name on the front door!?
“Divesting” is quite a different thing than “putting into trusts”. The latter is more or less a renaming/retitling exercise. For Trump to actually sell (divest) all his holdings would be an astronomically complicated affair probably rivaling the complexity of his legitimate startup tasks as POTUS. Think about selling trophy properties such as his Palos Verdes Gold Course on the CA Coast and his golf course in Scotland. (Not pretending I have the slightest idea of the scope of his holdings but it is obviously vast) But it would take years, probably, and there are obviously huge tranches of debt and bonds and all sorts of complexities surrounding them.
In practical fact, in the same way that Tony Rezko gave 0bama a huge bribe by selling him that piece of land next to his house for well under market; the same types of opportunities would exist in scores of instances in the transactions he would have to enter into in order to divest his holdings.
When Henry Paulsen came in (CEO of Goldman Sachs) as Tsy Sec’y and had to sell his GS shares...that’s somewhat a different affair. He had a huge pile of shares, too. But they were probably disposed of in an orderly fashion over several weeks.
In his book 30 years ago Trump discussed going after foreigners as customers.
He tailored his buildings to them, almost.