Running for President Can Be a Profitable Investment

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The Washington Post has a long piece tonight about Donald Trump’s latest FEC filing, which shows that business has boomed during his presidential campaign. It’s a little hard to make sense of, but apparently Trump claims that revenue from his various businesses rose from $362 million to $557 million. However, about $150 million of that came from one-off sales, so it’s unclear how much his campaign has really boosted things.

You can decide for yourself how seriously to take this, but here’s the most important part of the story:

While Trump’s campaign issued a statement referring to the form as a tally of his personal “income,” it is actually a list of his companies’ gross revenue — a figure that does not factor in the costs of paying employees and running the companies. In addition, the FEC form does not account for debt interest payments, a potentially significant expenditure for Trump, who lists five loans of over $50 million each.

In other words, this is all pretty meaningless, since we have no idea how well run Trump’s company is. Generally speaking, though, a large corporation is doing well if it records pretax earnings of around 10 percent. For a company like Trump’s, maybe the average is more like 15-20 percent. Then again, it could be lower if his debt service is high. Who knows?

That said, a rough guess puts Trump’s income last year somewhere in the range of $40-$100 million. Not bad.

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PLEASE—BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things it doesn’t like—which is most things that are true.

We’ll say it loud and clear: At Mother Jones, no one gets to tell us what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please do your part and help us reach our $150,000 membership goal by May 31.

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