Surprise: Trump Had Millions in Undisclosed Debt While President, and He Probably Would a Second Time Around Too

Shortly before being inaugurated in 2017, Donald Trump announced, to the dismay of ethics officials and laypeople who understood just how corrupt it was, that he would not financially divest from the Trump Organization while serving as president. At the time, it was obvious that this was a completely ridiculous setup, and in the intervening years, that assessment proved 1000% correct, as the 45th POTUS lined his pockets with not only taxpayer money but money from foreign governments. Of course, Trump making money, via the for-profit business one of his sons pledged to give him quarterly updates on during his time in office, wasn‘t the only major issue with the arrangement; on the flip side, there was the question of the enormous amount of cash Trump owed to other entities, which by his own admission clocked in at about $400 million at the end of his term. “From a national security perspective, that’s just an outrageous vulnerability,” Larry Pfeiffer, the director of the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence at George Mason University, told The Washington Post at the time.

Yet the even bigger vulnerability, from the perspective of the United States, was not just that its commander in chief owed a fuck-ton of money to a fuck-ton of people, but that said commander in chief had a long history of never telling the truth about anything. Which is apparently why, despite years of scrutiny—and the many opportunities he had to reveal it—we’re only just now learning that, when he was running for president the first time, and for several months after he took office, Trump owed millions of dollars to a company previously linked to North Korea.

Forbes’s Dan Alexander reports that documents obtained by the New York attorney general—who accused Donald Trump, his three eldest kids, and the Trump Organization of massive fraud in a recent lawsuit—show the family business had a previously undisclosed debt of $19.8 million to Daewoo, a South Korean business conglomerate that had partnered with Trump on a project in New York City. As Forbes notes, “Although officials have to list personal loans on their financial disclosures, the law does not require them to include loans to their companies, unless they are personally liable for the loans.” Having said that, while it’s unclear if Trump personally guaranteed the loans in question, the fact is, he “owned 100% of the entities responsible for the debt,” and it would have been nice to know what his company was on the hook for. While the debt was paid off in the first half of Trump’s first year in office, Forbes points out that it would no doubt have raised many an alarm bell if the ex-president had disclosed it while running for office.

Per Forbes:

Trump eliminated the debt five and a half months into his tenure as president, according to the documents. He seems to have acted with some urgency to wipe the liability off his balance sheet. From 2011 to 2016, the documents show that the balance stayed static at $19.8 million. Paperwork capturing Trump’s financial picture as of June 30, 2017, five months into his presidency, appears to show that the balance had dropped to $4.3 million, $15.5 million less than it had been a year earlier. Trump got rid of the debt altogether shortly after that. “Daewoo was bought out of its position on July 5, 2017,” the documents say, without specifying who exactly paid off the loan.

Although the debt appeared on the Trump Organization’s internal paperwork, it did not show up on Trump’s public financial disclosure reports, documents he was required to submit to federal officials while running for president and after taking office…. There’s little doubt that if the world had known about the debt while Trump was president, it would have sparked conflict-of-interest concerns, perhaps heightened by Daewoo’s historical ties to North Korea. (In the mid-1990s, the firm was the only South Korean company permitted to operate a business inside the country.) Most people as rich as Trump would not be heavily influenced by a $20 million loan. Regardless, the fact that the former president managed to keep the debt secret for so long underscores how weak the government’s ethics safeguards are, how difficult they are to strengthen—and how easily Trump could barrel right through them as he runs for president again in 2024.

Oh, and about 2024: Shortly after Trump announced that he was running for president for a third time, The New York Times reported that Trump had signed a deal with a Saudi real estate company that “intends to build a Trump-branded hotel, villas, and a golf course as part of a $4 billion real estate project in Oman.” (According to the Times, that came after the Trump Organization hosted Saudi-government-backed LIV Golf tournaments at its clubs in New Jersey and Florida, paid for by money originating from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.) “This is yet another example of Trump getting a personal financial benefit in exchange for past or future political power,” Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told the Times. “The Saudis and Oman government may believe that giving Trump this licensing deal will benefit them in the future, should Trump become president again. This deal could be a way to ensure that they will be in Trump’s good graces.” And speaking of the Trumps, the Saudis, and absurd conflicts of interest, it was just a few short months ago the Times reported that a newly formed private equity firm owned by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner received a $2 billion check from the Saudi government, which may or may not have been a thank-you for treating Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman so nicely amidst that whole kidnapping-and-murder-by-bone-saw scandal. Just something to think about!