Not even Deutsche will loan him money any more

The Turnberry golf resort in Scotland was the subject of a previously undisclosed loan request by the Trump Organization during the 2016 presidential campaign, two people familiar with the request said. Deutsche Bank turned down the application.

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In 2014 and 2015, a Trump legal entity lent at least $96 million to the subsidiary that operated Turnberry, according to British regulatory filings. The next year, the Trump Organization would go back to Deutsche Bank for more.

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Donald J. Trump was burning through cash. It was early 2016, and he was lending tens of millions of dollars to his presidential campaign and had been spending large sums to expand the Trump Organization’s roster of high-end properties. To finance his business’s growth, Mr. Trump turned to a longtime ally, Deutsche Bank, one of the few banks still willing to lend [him] money.

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Senior officials at the bank, including its future chief executive, believed that Mr. Trump’s divisive candidacy made such a loan too risky, the people said. Among their concerns was that if Mr. Trump won the election and then defaulted, Deutsche Bank would have to choose between not collecting on the debt or seizing the assets of the president of the United States.

Two of the people familiar with the loan request said the Trump Organization had been seeking to borrow against its Miami resort to pay for work on a golf property in Turnberry, Scotland.

A Trump Organization spokeswoman, Amanda Miller, denied that the company had needed outside funding for Turnberry.

  NYT

Of course she did.

The failed loan request is an untold chapter in Mr. Trump’s long and tortured relationship with the banking industry. It shows that he was actively engaged in running his business in the midst of the presidential campaign, and it is likely to attract scrutiny from Democrats on two House committees that are investigating his two-decade relationship with Deutsche Bank.

In the early 1990s, Mr. Trump’s hotel and casino properties declared bankruptcy four times, leaving prominent banks, including Citicorp and Manufacturers Hanover, with painful losses. The real estate mogul was all but excommunicated from Wall Street.

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The funding of Mr. Trump’s golf empire has been something of a mystery.

In the decade before he was elected president, Mr. Trump’s company spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying or renovating about a dozen clubs and resorts around the world. Despite Mr. Trump’s self-proclaimed fondness for relying on debt, the Trump Organization has reported that it used its own money for most of the acquisitions and upgrades.

A prominent golf journalist, James Dodson, said Mr. Trump’s son Eric had told him in 2013 that the company’s golf properties were funded by Russians. Eric Trump has denied making the comment.

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In 2008, amid the financial crisis, Mr. Trump stopped repaying a loan to finance the construction of a skyscraper in Chicago — and then sued the bank, accusing it of helping cause the crisis. After that lawsuit, Deutsche Bank’s investment-banking arm severed ties with Mr. Trump.

But by 2010, he was back doing business with Deutsche Bank through its private-banking unit, which catered to some of the world’s wealthiest people.

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Mr. Trump’s go-to in the private bank was Rosemary Vrablic, a senior banker in its New York office. In 2013, she was the subject of a flattering profile in The Mortgage Observer, a real estate magazine owned by Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was also among her clients.

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Around the time that Mr. Trump was winning New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, officials in the private-banking unit informed their superiors that they were inclined to provide him with the loan, according to one of the people familiar with the internal discussions.

Senior executives in New York balked, arguing that Mr. Trump’s candidacy made such a loan unacceptably risky, the three people said. In part, they feared the bank’s reputation could be harmed if the transaction were to become public because of the polarizing statements Mr. Trump was making on the campaign trail.

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That was the first time that some senior officials realized the extent of their bank’s dealings with Mr. Trump, the three people said.

The proposed loan was examined by an internal committee that is responsible for vetting transactions to ensure they do not pose serious risks to the bank’s reputation, the people said. That March, the committee unanimously rejected the loan.

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A Trump entity ended up lending at least $45 million to Turnberry that year, on top of the $96 million it had lent Turnberry in the previous two years.

What Trump entity, and where did that entity get the money?

Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee, overseen by Representative Maxine Waters, have been asking questions about Deutsche Bank’s loans to Mr. Trump since 2017.

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Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election, has said he wants to look closely at Deutsche Bank because of its past involvement in laundering money for Russian nationals.

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Mr. Schiff and [Representative Maxine] Waters are planning to conduct a joint investigation of Mr. Trump’s involvement with Deutsche Bank.

And when Old Lardass cries "Fake News!"...

During the campaign, Mr. Trump sought to take advantage of that relationship when rivals painted him as a bad businessman who was frozen out of the mainstream financial system.

The same month that Deutsche Bank rejected the loan proposal, Mr. Trump sought to blunt those attacks by citing his warm relationships with Wall Street firms. He singled out Deutsche Bank.

“They are totally happy with me,” he told The New York Times in March 2016. “I do business with them today.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.