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Since Donald Trump still refuses to tell the public what his investments are, how much they’re all worth, and which entities he owes tremendous amounts of cash to, it's been up to American journalists to try to piece together what they can. You know, just to make sure our next sitting president isn't Mafia-connected, or isn't in hock to specific individual Russians for a few billion dollars.
We used to demand that our presidents 1.) goddamn tell us this in the first place and 2.) immediately divest from all their businesses and stocks and peanut farms (true story) for the explicit goddamn purpose of ensuring the presidency would not be held in thrall to individual businesses, corporations, or Big Peanut—but we're not doing that anymore. Because Donald Trump says he's just not going to do that and that, apparently, it’s just fine with all the people who were having great frothing fits over even the imaginary optics of such potential conflicts just over one bare month ago.
So here's a Mother Jones contribution to the effort: Just who the hell has got our next president wrapped around their corporate fingers? Who does Donald Trump owe money to?
All of Trump's top properties—including Trump Tower, the Trump National Doral golf course, and his brand new luxury hotel in Washington, DC—are heavily mortgaged. That means Trump maintains critical financial relationships with his creditors. These interactions pose a significant set of potential conflicts because his creditors are large financial institutions (domestic and foreign) with their own interests and policy needs. Each one could be greatly affected by presidential decisions, and Trump certainly has a financial interest in their well-being.
Below is a list of all the financial players that Trump owes money to and how much Trump directly has borrowed from each one. This roster is based on publicly available loan documents. According to his own public disclosure, Trump, as of May, was on the hook for 16 loans worth at least $713 million. This list does not include an estimated $2 billion in debt amassed by real estate partnerships that include Trump. One of those loans is a $950 million deal that was cobbled together by Goldman Sachs and the state-owned Bank of China—an arrangement that ethics experts believe violates the Constitution's emolument clause, which prohibits foreign governments from providing financial benefits to federal officials.
The list is here. The short version is that Trump's biggest known personal debts are held by Deutsche Bank, for $364 million, and the far lesser known Ladder Capital, for $282 million. Ladder is looking to perhaps sell those loans. The buyers could be anyone, in any country. If Russia wanted a few hundred million dollars worth of Trump gratitude, a Russian-owned bank could purchase that gratitude at standard market rates.
Yup. We're still boned.
The key problem here is that other than that magical emolument clause, the vast majority of checks against a sitting president being an absolute crook are traditional, not legal. It's been assumed that presidents would, say, release themselves from their businesses because it would be unthinkably corrupt not to. It's been assumed that if a top leader refused those ethical norms, legislators from both parties would be so mortified that they would cast that leader out. Even the emolument clause itself, a key constitutional check against presidential crookedness, relies on the Congress to be the arbiter of that crookedness: If they declare that Trump getting cash money from diplomats who stay at his own hotels or invest in his own properties is fine, because reasons, then it becomes the new “fine.”
The American system is set up such that a crooked person or someone too much in hock to the whims of a foreign power can be rejected by, presumably, the ethical nature of the rest of the elected leaders. That has always been the core bargain, and the core assumption: Any movement toward corruption would be checked by widespread outrage elsewhere, by other parties.
Guess what? We don't have that. Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and the set of House Republicans willing to see conspiracy under every desk and chair during the last presidency have all remained specifically and ostentatiously silent as Trump has brushed aside longstanding ethical presumptions of how the presidency should operate.
So we're boned. Because they don't care.