Donald Trump has taken an $18 million loss since buying his luxury golf resort in Doonbeg, County Clare in 2014, according to a recent Forbes analysis.
Trump acquired the property for $20 million in 2014 and spent a further $13 million developing the resort between 2014 and 2019 but still took a $14 million loss in the five-year period.
The resort made a further $4.4 million loss during 2020 despite availing of roughly $600,000 in Irish Government pandemic subsidies.
In 2020, The New York Times reported, after viewing 15 years of Trump's tax returns, that Trump reported $315.6 million worth of losses at his golf courses around the world since 2000.
In 2017, Trump, who had been recently elected as President of the United States, said he "couldn't care less" about his resort in Doonbeg.
"I own a big property in Ireland, magnificent property called Doonbeg," he said during a joint interview with the Times of London and the German newspaper Bild in January 2017.
"What happened is I went for an approval to do this massive, beautiful expansion – that was when I was a developer, now I couldn't care less about it … but I learned a lot because … they were using environmental tricks to stop a project from being built. I found it to be a very unpleasant experience.
"To get the approvals from the EU would have taken years.
"I don't think that's good for a country like Ireland.
“So you know what I did? I said forget it, I'm not gonna build it."
In 2019, it emerged that Trump's Irish golf resort charged Irish police hundreds of Euro for extra coffee during "inclement weather" during President Trump's June visit.
Trump has encountered similar financial difficulties in his two Scottish resorts at Turnberry and Aberdeen.
Trump Turnberry, the jewel in Trump's European golf crown, has posted losses of $68 million losses since the former President bought the property for $65 million in 2014.
Trump's smallest European resort in Aberdeen has posted $17 million in losses since he bought it in 2012 and recorded $1.8 million in losses in 2020 despite receiving $600,000 of pandemic grants.
Trump has now recorded more than $100 million in total losses since purchasing the three European resorts, according to the Forbes report on his British and Irish financial filings.
A Trump Organization representative later responded to the Forbes report, stating that the $100 million figure was "dishonest and incredibly misleading".
The representative noted that Forbes counted non-cash items such as depreciation and foreign exchange and said that combined losses at the three sites are closer to $35 million without those factors.
However, the Trump Organization includes both depreciation and foreign exchange in "operating losses" in its own financial reports.
The combined value of Trump's three resorts is estimated to stand at $181 million despite more than $240 million worth of investment.
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