Blue-red split on golf greens
MOORESVILLE, N.C. — Business is booming here at the Trump National Golf Club.
The real estate office is selling million-dollar homes, the membership roster is nearly maxed out and the private club is booking a record number of events, including a soldout “Bag-Lady Luncheon,” where luxury leather handbags were auctioned for a charity that supports military veterans.
“How do we get busier?” asked Jennifer Minton, the club’s controller, during a recent tour of the grounds. “We only have so many weekends.”
It is a very different story in Los Angeles.
The Trump National Golf Club there, a public course, has seen a double-digit drop in revenue from golf in the first six months of 2017 compared with a year earlier, according to documents obtained through a public records request. A large crowd assembled this spring, but they were protesters spelling out “RESIST!” with their bodies.
The divergent fortunes of the North Carolina and Los Angeles clubs reflect a broader pattern across President Donald Trump’s business empire: The red-blue political divide is not only informing the president’s policies, but it also is influencing his family-owned company’s bottom line.
Trump’s most recent financial disclosure statement, a 98-page report in June, showed the Trump Organization brought in at least $597 million in revenue during his 2016 campaign and the first few months of his presidency, down about 3 percent compared with his previous filing in May 2016.
But an analysis by The New York Times of financial records, and interviews with club members and employees show most of his golf venues fared better in areas that supported Trump in last year’s election than in those that did not.
The club north of Charlotte is deep in Trump territory — the adjacent neighborhood, named the Point, is perhaps best known as home to more than a dozen NASCAR drivers and crew chiefs, and precinct records show nearly 70 percent of area voters favored Trump over Hillary Clinton.
“We think of them as family here, not just owners of the club,” said Chuck McAllister, an executive at a global shoebox-manufacturing company, who held a fundraiser for Trump last summer at the golf club. The event, he said, attracted nearly 300 supporters, including North Carolina’s then governor, and raised more than $1.4 million.
Revenues were also rising at the Trump golf clubs in Jupiter and West Palm Beach, Fla., two of the three golf clubs that the family owns in the state. Trump carried Florida in the election.
Until the violence in Charlottesville, Va., which generated a wave of cancellations at the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., business at that Trump property was also climbing, according to the president’s financial disclosure report.
That report paints a darker picture in states that Trump lost.
The Trump SoHo condominium-hotel in New York and the Trump International Hotel & Tower Chicago — both cities that are liberal strongholds — are seeing signs of hardship, according to two employees briefed on the company’s financials who were not authorized to speak publicly about them.
The red-blue contrast is even more apparent with the golf courses. Revenues over the past year have declined at the Ferry Point golf club in the Bronx, N.Y., at the Bedminster club in New Jersey, and at the club in Westchester County, N.Y., just a few miles from Hillary Clinton’s home. Trump lost both states by large margins.
At the club in the Bronx, which is open to the public, golfers played about 2,200 fewer rounds in the most recent fiscal year, an 8 percent drop compared with a year earlier, according to data from the city of New York.
The Trump Organization does not dispute that some properties are showing sensitivity to political factors. In June, the company introduced a line of budgetconscious hotels — the first are planned for Mississippi, which Trump won by an overwhelming margin — with a name, American Idea, that echoed the president’s campaign themes.