Did you know Trump made millions from foreign businesses while in office?

There was a huge story that hardly got the attention it deserved in 2023: an astounding report from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington regarding the hundreds of millions Donald Trump's businesses made from foreign governments while in office.

Former President Trump took in roughly $160 million dollars from his business dealings outside the United States while President according to the report, which looked at a variety of transactions from foreign governments made to Trump's various businesses.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is a nonprofit organization that investigates corruption in American politics and they released a damaging report in April, 2023 on Trump’s international business dealings while in office. 

According to CREW, the former president’s tax returns and financial data from the years he was in the Oval Office showed that he pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars in business earnings from foreign countries, many of which he had major conflicts of interest in. 

About one-third of the cash came from Trump’s Aberdeen and Turnberry golf course in Scotland, which netted the former president $58 million, while a now-closed hotel in Vancouver brought in $36.5 million from Canada. 

The former president made $24.4 million in Ireland as well as another $9.7 million in Indonesia and 9.6 million in India, money which CREW’s Rebbecca Jacobs and Robert Maguire say Trump should have never been allowed to earn. 

While the report couldn’t directly tie the money from the former president’s international business dealings to any quid pro quo political arrangement, it did address Trump's many conflicts of interest and suggest it wasn’t all earned in good faith. 

“Throughout his time in office, President Trump, his family, and his Republican allies repeatedly assured the public that his refusal to divest from his businesses wouldn’t lead to any conflicts of interest,” Jacobs and Maguire’s report read. 

“When it came to foreign conflicts of interest, Trump and his company pledged to pause foreign business. They did not,” the report added before listing some of the most glaring issues that occurred during the former president’s time in office. 

A good example of the former president’s obvious conflicts of interest came in 2018 when he allegedly asked the then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom to change the location of the British Open to his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland. 

According to NPR’s Frank Langfitt, Ambassador Robert Wood Johnson VI told embassy staff that Trump was a friend and had asked him to get the tournament's venue moved. 

"I advised him that doing so would violate federal ethics rules and be generally inappropriate," Lewis Lukens, a prominent embassy official wrote in a text to NPR confirming the story. 

Ambassador Wood still raised the issue with Scotland's Secretary of State David Mundell, but Langfitt noted that the British government refuted the claim in a statement, saying “Johnson made no request regarding the British Open or any other sporting event."

According to a 2019 CREWS report, the former president has had thousands of interactions like the one in 2018 with 2222 recorded incidents of Trump properties being visited by government officials and 272 governmental events being held at Trump properties. 

The 2019 report also noted that there had been hundreds of incidents where political officials used their platform to promote the Trump Organization or foreign governments granted foreign trademarks to the Trump brand.  

“The full extent to which Trump’s foreign business ties influenced his decision-making as president may never be known," wrote Jacobs and Maguire.

However, the CREWS investigators added that there was "plenty of evidence that Trump’s actions in the White House were influenced–if not guided–by his financial interests, subverting the national interests for his own parochial concerns."

Jacobs and Maguire finished their report by adding that there was likely still left to be learned about how Trump “truly abused the presidency for his own personal profit.”

In February 2021, CREWS' Jordan Libowitz and Caitlin Moniz released a different report on the amount of money Trump made during his time in office, a number that reached $1.6 billion in outside revenue and income" throughout the four years of his presidency.

The Trump Organization earned at least $1,613,583,013  according to the report while the former president claimed $1,790,614,202 but the report's authors noted it was difficult to know for sure how much Trump took home from that number due to the vague nature of some of the items claimed as well as the structure of his business.