White House, Inc.: How Donald Trump Turned the Presidency into a Business

by Dan Alexander

Overview

An in-depth investigation into Donald Trump’s business—and how he used America’s top job to service it.

White House, Inc. is a newsmaking exposé that details President Trump’s efforts to make money off of politics, taking us inside his exclusive clubs, luxury hotels, overseas partnerships, commercial properties, and personal mansions. Alexander tracks hundreds of millions of dollars flowing freely between big businesses and President Trump. He explains, in plain language, how Trump tried to translate power into profit, from the 2016 campaign to the ramp-up to the 2020 campaign.  

Just because you turn the presidency into a business doesn’t necessarily mean you turn it into a good business. After Trump won the White House, profits plunged at certain properties, like the Doral golf resort in Miami. But the presidency also opened up new opportunities. Trump’s commercial and residential property portfolio morphed into a one-of-a-kind marketplace, through which anyone, anywhere, could pay the president of the United States. Hundreds of customers—including foreign governments, big businesses, and individual investors—obliged.

The president's disregard for norms sparked a trickle-down ethics crisis with no precedent in modern American history. Trump appointed an inner circle of centimillionaires and billionaires—including Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Wilbur Ross, and Carl Icahn—who came with their own conflict-ridden portfolios. Following the president’s lead, they trampled barriers meant to separate their financial holdings from their government roles.

White House, Inc. is a page-turning, hair-raising investigation into Trump and his team, who corrupted the U.S. presidency and managed to avoid accountability. Until now.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593188521
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/22/2020
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	9.20(w) x 6.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Dan Alexander is a senior editor at Forbes, where he leads the magazine's coverage of Donald Trump. Twice a year, Alexander is responsible for putting together Forbes' estimate of Donald Trump's net worth. Alexander won the 2018 ASME NEXT award, given to magazine journalists under 30 who "demonstrated extraordinary promise." The New York City Society of Professional Journalists honored him with back-to-back awards for best business feature of the year in 2017 and 2018. Born and raised in Ohio, he now lives in New Jersey.

Read an Excerpt

The old Delmonico Hotel stands on the corner of New York City’s 59th Street and Park Avenue, one of the most prestigious intersections in the United States. Donald Trump purchased the building, with its arched windows and brick facade, for a reported $115 million in 2002 and spent another $85 million or so converting it into luxury condominiums. Retrofitted with Italian fixtures and marble finishes, he rebranded the place Trump Park Avenue. By the end of 2005 he had sold 91 units for $231 million, according to a review of property records—and still had another 31 units to spare. The deal was Donald Trump at his best: recognizing an underperforming asset, dressing it up with some glamour, and selling it to a bunch of big-budgeted buyers.

There was one purchaser, however, who paid a relatively small sum of money. Just months after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Ivanka Trump reached a deal with her father for a 1,549-square-foot  apartment. The price: $1.5 million, or $968 per square foot.4The other buyers, by comparison, paid an average of $1,667 a square foot, meaning Ivanka got a discount of more than $1 million. It’s nice to be the daughter of the developer.

America’s first daughter, who did not respond to a list of questions sent to both the Trump Organization and the White House, started her career outside of her father’s real estate business. She joined another development firm called Forest City Ratner, working as a project manager for its retail division. A year into that position, longing for more responsibility, she headed home, where her old man was waiting with an offer to become an executive at the Trump Organization. “Being 24 and 28, respectively, we’re able to do things that we never would be able to do,” Ivanka said in a 2006 interview with her brother Don Jr. “So we cut out years of sort of bureaucratic paper pushing.”

Inside Trump Tower, Ivanka also became a television star, joining her father onscreen for The Apprentice in 2006. Not long after, she began to develop her own brand. Her father represented successful, strong men. Ivanka, American heiress, wanted to stand for sophisticated working women. “I remember one of my earlier Christmas gifts was a Barbie, and I was devastated,” she said on the set of Conan O’Brien’s late-night talk show in 2007, “because my brothers had gotten Legos and Erector Sets. So to me, this was traumatic, and I wanted that. So I ended up taking my younger brother’s Legos, bringing them into his room, to add insult to injury, locking him out, taking my mother’s superglue—from the 1980s, there was plenty for her nails— and gluing the Legos together in a model of Trump Tower.”

It was a perfectly crafted tale, one stunningly similar to a story Donald Trump previously told about his brother. “Robert is two years younger than I am,” Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal, “and we have always been very close, although he is much quieter and more easygoing than I am. One day we were in the playroom of our house, building with blocks. I wanted to build a very tall building, but it turned out that I didn’t have enough blocks. I asked Robert if I could borrow some of his, and he said, ‘Okay, but you have to give them back when you’re done.’ I ended up using all of my blocks, and then all of his, and when I was done, I’d created a beautiful building. I liked it so much that I glued the whole thing together. And that was the end of Robert’s blocks.”

Ivanka Trump is Donald Trump but 35 years younger, with an aristocratic air and a feminist twist. After joining the Trump Organization, she technically worked for her older brother, Don Jr., but they operated more like equals.10 And before long, their father began giving clues about whom he considered his heir or, in this case, heiress apparent. In 2007, when Ivanka was just 25, he added her to the board of Trump Entertainment Resorts—passing over her big brother. Ivanka earned $150,000 a year in director fees from the publicly traded company, the same one her father had been bleeding cash from for years. In 2009, days before the business filed for its second bankruptcy in five years, Donald and Ivanka both resigned from the board.

Table of Contents

Author's Note xiii

Prologue 1

1 Art of the Self-Deal: The Rise of Donald Trump 9

2 Moscow Money: Trump, Putin, and the 2016 Presidential Election 31

3 The Takeover: Inaugurating America's Billionaire in Chief 55

4 Presidential Palace: Inside Trump's Other Washington, D.C., Home 73

5 Bad Lie: The Truth behind Trump's Golf Game 95

6 All the President's Tenants: Inside Trump's Towers 117

7 Cashing In: The Business behind Trump's 500-Flus Homes 137

8 All in the Family: "Nepotism is Kind of a Factor of Life" 153

9 Like Father, Like Son-in-Law: Jared Kushner's World of Conflicts 169

10 Fill the Swamp: Trump's Team 185

11 2020 Money: Campaign Cash and Coronavirus Costs 205

Appendix 215

Acknowledgments 221

Notes 225

Editorial Reviews

2020-11-18
Despite his claims, Donald Trump is not a good businessman—but he is adept at using other people’s money, including yours and ours.

This book, writes Forbessenior editor Alexander, represents “the most complete financial investigation of President Trump’s business ever published.” Certainly, its pages of tables are suggestive of a business empire that has both benefited and suffered from its brand name. Though Trump boasts of financial holdings many times greater than reality, his net worth has fallen in office precisely because his “decision to keep hold of his business empire proved to be a bad bet that poisoned his properties and, more important, his presidency.” His nickel-and-dime habits of charging rent to his Secret Service details in New York and Florida are just one symptom of that poison, but they go back a long way, lessons learned from Trump’s father, who gave properties to his children, paid them rent for them, and then recovered the money. “It’s tough to catch every lie,” Alexander writes, but plenty of truths emerge, from Trump’s debut in the press after being sued for discriminating against Black renters to the extraordinary debt load his organization carries. And then there’s that famous double-dealing. Even a simple hamburger at the Trump Hotel in D.C. costs $26, and the boss requires that the substandard products of his Virginia winery be sold exclusively—at $68 for a bottle of bad Chardonnay. The inflated figures are characteristic: Using a couple of industry-standard methods of calculation, Alexander argues that the D.C. hotel is worth about $300 million less than the $500 million Trump is asking for it. The author does give Trump props for his skill at buying and refurbishing distressed golf courses—though again, after the election, bookings at just one of them instantly fell by 100,000 nights.

A revealing autopsy of a business empire that, it appears, may soon conduct its operations far from the White House.

Kirkus Reviews