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WSJ: Trump Not Rich Enough to Self-Finance for November
Monday, May 16, 2016 09:53 AM
By: Cathy Burke
Real estate billionaire Donald Trump – who's preparing to take donations after self-financing his GOP presidential primary run – wouldn't have had the staggering chunk of ready cash he'd need to foot the general election bill, the Wall Street Journal reports.
In an analysis posted Monday, the Journal notes the real estate mogul's financial disclosure last July showed he had around $78 million and $232 million in cash and relatively liquid assets such as stocks and bonds.
That pales in comparison to the $721 million President Barack Obama spent in in 2012 up to Election Day, or the $449 million GOP nominee Mitt Romney shelled out during the same period, the Journal reports.
"This would leave hundreds of millions to be made up," the Journal analysis noted. "And Mr. Trump’s businesses don’t produce that much in a year,."
According to the Journal, Trump's 2016 pretax income is likely to be about $160 million.
"The result is if Mr. Trump stuck with self-financing, he likely would have faced difficult decisions over whether to sell some of his properties or borrow more money against them," the Journal writes.
In its breakdown, the Journal reports that it poured over 170 items of "employment assets and income" like real estate, golf courses, management companies and licensing deals, listed in that July 2015 financial disclosure form.
The Journal then estimated how much pretax income each item should yield this year, relying on public documents and interviews with dozens of former and current Trump Organization executives and people familiar with his businesses.
Campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks tells the Journal "the income number is wrong by a lot, but Mr. Trump said, 'Who cares—it doesn’t matter.' "
Trump tells the Journal its analysis doesn’t take into account other sources of income he has, such as 114 licensing deals the Trump Organization is negotiating "all over the world" that he says would generate "hundreds of millions of dollars" in cash flow.
"I’m not allowed to reveal them because I have partnerships with other people in other countries," he tells the Journal.
A Trump aide also said the Journal analysis didn’t include cash held by Trump’s various properties.
Additionally, if Trump wanted to borrow to help pay for his campaign, he could face costs and complications entailed in raising real-estate debt – a dangerous reminder of the close call he had 25 years ago taking on heavy debt when he was in danger of personal bankruptcy, the Journal reports.
"I know it could have gone a different way," Trump tells the Journal. "I’ve become very much more conservative."
