Our long national nightmare will soon be over after Trump finally leaves the White House, but a new nightmare will begin for him.
Trump's new nightmare will involve upwards of $1 billion in Trump Organization debt maturing over the next two to six years and him having no way to pay for it without recycling the same debt yet again.
To that end, Politico reports that company officials have been planning a post-election push to look for revenue in foreign countries.
Trump’s namesake company plans to resume foreign real estate projects, likely luxury hotels, as it grapples with a tarnished brand in the United States and the need to pay off hundreds of millions of dollars of debt, according to three people familiar with the plans, not to mention past public statements from Trump's children. Company officials have already vowed to look into more developments in India and will be expected to give a second look to projects they had considered in China, Turkey, Colombia and Brazil before Trump entered office. [...]
Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said all former presidents have faced controversy with their post-office activities, especially after ex-President Ronald Reagan traveled to Japan to deliver a $1 million speech. But Trump’s ventures, Brinkley said, go far beyond that.
“What Trump is doing is trying to make a vast fortune, which has never been tried before, parlaying his presidency into massive amounts of money abroad,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
This was the whole point of Trump's campaign for president in the first place, wasn't it? Or at least most of it.
Trump is a man of ego and nothing stroked it quite like occupying the Oval Office, but he was also circling the financial drain if not completely broke when he ran for president.
Trump used his own campaigns and the presidency itself to support his own businesses which he never divested from. And he's not going to have either of those things soon, but he also spent his four years as president courting relationships with specific foreign leaders and officials without scruples hoping he would be repaid by them when he's out office. Trump's explicit blessing of China's concentration camps for Uyghurs Muslims in conversations with President Xi Jinping immediately come to mind. Trump's decision to abandon our Kurdish allies who fought ISIS for us so Turkey's Erdogan could move against them is another decision that could benefit Trump when he's out office. The list goes on.
Over the next few years, I expect to learn about backroom deals Trump cut while in office that were never reported before.