https://www.vox.com/21472063/trump-tax-returns-debts-owes-money

Trump has a tangled history with Deutsche Bank dating back to 1998. The New York Times’s David Enrich has chronicled how Trump would obtain a large loan from one arm of Deutsche, run into trouble paying back that loan, and then go to another arm of Deutsche to try and get more money. At one point he even sued the bank to try to avoid repayment; the parties ended up settling. Trump then paid his settlement obligation with a loan from yet another division of Deutsche.

There are questions about Trump properties for which he didn’t get loans

The more pertinent mystery about Trump’s money isn’t about these loans mentioned by the Times that are coming due. It’s about the properties he bought and developed without getting any financial assistance at all.

The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold has reported that, between 2006 and 2014, Trump made a major change in the way he did business: He started dropping large amounts of cash to buy and develop certain properties, rather than relying on loans. Most notably, Trump bought and renovated a golf course in Turnberry, Scotland, for over $200 million — for which he paid entirely in cash.

The Trumps have claimed they simply had the cash on hand for this. But the New Yorker’s Adam Davidson doesn’t buy it.

“The portfolio of assets that Trump owns does not suggest that he would have so much money that he can casually spend a few hundred million on a whim,” Davidson wrote in 2018.

“There simply isn’t enough money coming into Trump’s known business to cover the massive outlay he spent on Turnberry.” Davidson has gone on to suggest that Trump’s expensive purchases like this may truly have been “on behalf of others” — that he was laundering money for some shady wealthy foreigners.

We don’t know where the hundreds of millions in cash Trump used for Turnberry and these other properties came from, and there’s no hard evidence that it was connected to money laundering. But Trump hasn’t given a convincing explanation for this, so it remains an unresolved mystery.