Apprentice Fee Another Indication Of Possible Weakness In Trump's Finances

Yesterday, I tweeted about the revelation that NBC had signed up for 8 more episodes of The Apprentice and that Donald Trump was going to still remain involved in the show as Executive Producer. The conflicts of interest here are enormous. There is the serious ethical and perhaps legal problem of the President getting paid by a company while supposedly working for the American people. And there is the serious ethical problem of a media company with a news organization paying an individual it is tasked with covering. There is once again the destruction of another one of the norms of democracy. But it also raises some interesting an disturbing questions about the finances of Donald Trump that he feels compelled to take what I’m assuming is not really a significant amount of money from NBC for someone who claims to be a billionaire.

Josh Marshall has an interesting post up today that posits that Trump needs every dime he can get because he is basically insolvent. The reason he must ensure that either he or his children continue to run the Trump Organization is because it relies on a constant flow of new money simply to keep on going. Marshall also points out that Trump had apparently sold all his stock way back in June, at approximately the same time he finally forgave the $50 million loan he had given his own campaign. He was almost forced to forgive the loan because donors refused to give his campaign money in the belief that Trump would just use it to pay himself back. Trump says that he sold his stock to eliminate conflicts of interest which is hardly believable since he continues to actually create new conflicts as this Apprentice deal shows. And, as an aside, it shows that he isn’t a great dealmaker as his stock portfolio would be soaring right now as the market rallies in anticipation of his business-friendly policies. The more plausible explanation is that, having forgiven the loan, he needed additional liquidity. Marshall says, “A heavily leveraged business, one that is indebted and heavily dependent on cash flow to keep everything moving forward, can be kind of like a shark. It has to keep moving forward or it dies…It is certainly plausible that if Trump simply sold off his company in toto, he’d be in debt. Maybe there wouldn’t be anything left to put in a blind trust.” If Marshall’s theory is true, the corruption and potential for outright bribery of Trump will be beyond our worst fears.