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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.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 22, 2020 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780593188538
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780593188538
- File size: 2651 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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December 1, 2020
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 Forbes senior 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.COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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