What is the Trump Organization? [A Holding Company & Trade Name]

Written by Ricky Nave in Business Entities & Structures

“The Trump Organization” is a trade name (also known as a DBA or fictitious name) that multiple business entities associated with Donald Trump use. For example, on December 6, 2022 two business entities (“THE TRUMP CORPORATION” and “THE TRUMP PAYROLL CORPORATION”) that both used “THE TRUMP ORGANIZATION” DBA were convicted of criminal charges (yes, business entities can be convicted of crimes).

“The Trump Organization” is also part of the real name of multiple business entities (e.g. “THE TRUMP ORGANIZATION, INC.” registered in New York state and “THE TRUMP ORGANIZATION LLC” registered in Delaware).

Finally, to add one more element of confusion, “The Trump Organization” is also a trademark registered by Donald Trump and owned by “DTTM OPERATIONS LLC”).

Unfortunately, almost all of Trump’s companies are privately owned which means there is very limited information available about which ones are subsidiaries of other ones. Most likely, one of the companies actually named “THE TRUMP ORGANIZATION INC” or “THE TRUMP ORGANIZATION LLC” is the holding company for most of the others, but we don’t know that for sure.

What we do know is that in 2015 as part of his presidential bid, Donald Trump submitted financial disclosures (OGE Form 278e) to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) which disclosed 515 business entities (LLCs, corporations, partnerships, and trusts) in which he held positions.

Donald-Trump-Financial-Disclosures-2015-Federal-Election-CommissionDownload

These disclosures are limited and don’t reveal the parent-subsidiary or other structures that relate many of the entities, but they do show the legal complexity of the organization. The annual state filing fees just to maintain 500 business entities are over $50,000.

The beneficial owners for most of the Trump Organization entities are Donald J. Trump and/or the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust dated April 7, 2014.

Organization History

The organization was originally founded in 1927 as a residential real estate development company in Queens, by Donald Trump’s paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Christ Trump, and his father, Fred Trump, under the name “E. Trump & Son”.

Donald Trump officially joined the company in 1968, and by the 80’s, he had pivoted the company from residential real estate into hotels, casinos, and other ventures.

The company has been controversial for decades, from a 1973 lawsuit against the company for violating the Fair Housing Act, to a 1989 fine for missing basic financial records and violating generally accepted accounting principles, to hundreds of accusations of not paying contractors for services rendered, to convictions of two subsidiaries for criminal tax fraud in December of 2022.

Note: This diagram is an artistic illustration of The Trump Organization’s structure. The actual structure is not known since the companies involved are private and have released minimal records to the public.

Ricky Nave

In college, Ricky studied physics & math, won a prestigious research competition hosted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, started several small businesses including an energy chewing gum business and a computer repair business, and graduated with a thesis in algebraic topology. After graduating, Ricky attended grad school at Duke University in the mathematics PhD program where he worked on quantum algorithms & non-Euclidean geometry models for flexible proteins. He also worked in cybersecurity at Los Alamos during this time before eventually dropping out of grad school to join a startup working on formal semantic modeling for legal documents. Finally, he left that startup to start his own in the finance & crypto space. Now, he helps entrepreneurs pay less capital gains tax.

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