What are available, however, are the financial-disclosure forms that Trump was required to file during the campaign with the Federal Election Commission. The paperwork, which he submitted in July 2015 and May 2016, offers the best window we have into his finances. Given their length—his 2015 disclosure takes up 92 pages, while the 2016 version is 104 pages—their format makes them borderline unreadable; as submitted, the text is not searchable, and can’t be easily copied in most browsers. A new effort by BuzzFeed—“Help Us Map TrumpWorld”—includes some, but not all, of the data.
In the interest of increasing the accessibility of these important documents, which remain the only public records of the president-elect’s finances, we have converted these disclosures into a Google spreadsheet, making them more readily accessible.
The data for the spreadsheet can be found here.
Like the disclosure forms themselves, the spreadsheet is divided into several sections, each of which provides potentially useful information about the president-elect’s business endeavors. The first sheet lists every position that Trump held at the time of filing, or had held as recently as 2013, outside of the presidency. The second lists some 188 assets, from endeavors in everything from real estate to beauty pageants to books, and the income Trump derives from each. The next three note his apparently ongoing agreement with the Screen Actors Guild, his sources of compensation exceeding $5,000 per year (none), and his wife Melania’s ongoing licensing deals. The paperwork lists his other assets, including stocks, bonds, and investments in mutual and hedge funds, and the income they provided for each year that he filed, which is where the Indianapolis Star learned that Trump held stock in the air-conditioner manufacturer Carrier’s parent corporation, The Carlyle Group, raising questions about his intervention at Carrier’s plant in Indianapolis. Next comes the listing of several of the financial institutions with which the president-elect has outstanding debt, such as Deutsche Bank, to which the Trump Organization owes billions of dollars. Finally, the last sheet discloses the ownership structures of some 532 companies and corporations with which Trump is involved.
Whether these sheets reflect the current state of Trump’s finances is unknown. He has stated—without proof—that he has sold off his stocks in preparation to enter office; at a press conference on January 11, he and one of his lawyers, Sheri Dillon, claimed that he would be stepping down from many of the positions he held at various companies, providing no verification beyond a table stacked with folders that they claimed contained the legal documentation of the arrangements. Nobody in the press has had access to these documents, and Trump will not have to file again until 2018, meaning that the information could remain unverified for at least another year. Moreover, there are some differences between the 2015 and 2016 disclosure forms, mainly reflecting changes in Trump’s finances, such as stocks he had sold off or purchased, companies with which he became no longer involved, debt that has matured; in our spreadsheet, any information that was only present in 2015 is highlighted in yellow, while anything only listed in 2016 is highlighted in green. As of now, however, these FEC filings reflect the best available information on Trump’s financial situation, information which may become increasingly relevant as descriptions of his conflicts of interest and suggestions of how they may be impacting his behavior pile up.