All the President's LLCs

Donald Trump’s complex business structure may have helped avoid Obamacare taxes.

- Pat Regnier

Behind the stainless steel and glass of Chicago’s Trump International Hotel & Tower lies a skeleton of 180,000 cubic yards of high-performance concrete. Below that, 57 rock caissons, some as thick as 10 feet and as long as 80 feet, anchor the skyscraper to the ground and bedrock. The building’s ownership structure is complex, too.

A limited liability company owns the building, and then another company owns that owner— followed by three more that own the owner’s owner, according to the latest federal financial disclosure from President Trump. Other companies appear to handle specific tasks, managing the building’s commercial, residential, and hotel businesses. And then there are companies that own those companies. The trail ends at the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, which collects income from the president’s worldwide businesses for his benefit. A flowchart of the structure “would go from the ceiling of a ballroom to the floor,” says Ronald Wiener, a tax lawyer specializing in partnerships.

The arrangement is not unusual among people who own their own large businesses, and it may have helped Trump avoid a specific federal tax on tens of millions of dollars in income from the Chicago property. Similar structures may provide the same benefit across Trump’s global holdings, all perfectly legally. This might be the best part, from the president’s perspective: The tax in question was created by the 2010 Affordable Care Act—or, as Trump has called it, the “Obamacare nightmare.”