POCKETS LINED

Trump Made $35M Selling Real Estate in 2018: Forbes

Not all of those sales can be tracked to individual buyers—making it impossible to know who was enriching the president.

President Trump made $35 million selling real estate in 2018, according to a Friday report from Forbes. Although the day-to-day operations of the Trump Organization have been delegated to two of his sons, Eric and Don Jr., the president continues to own the business, allowing him to collect payments when properties are sold. Over half of that windfall came from a single sale in Brooklyn, Forbes notes, when Trump and associates sold a federally subsidized housing complex in Brooklyn for an estimated $900 million. Forbes estimates Trump pocketed about $20 million from that deal. He also made approximately $5.5 million from selling 36 units of his 64-story tower in Las Vegas. There are a few problems here, Forbes notes: About one-third of the Las Vegas buyers worked through limited liability companies, or LLCs, which allow them to hide their identities—meaning there’s no way to know who’s paying the president. And one of the Vegas residents listed his home address as Taiyuan City, China, despite the fact that one of Trump’s lawyers promised that “No new foreign deals will be made whatsoever during the duration of President Trump’s presidency.”