Timothy L. O'Brien, Columnist

Trump's Hotel in the Swamp

The government is your landlord. You run the government. Let's make a deal.

March 24, 2017 at 2:44 PM UTC

Timothy L. O'Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. A former editor and reporter for the New York Times, he is author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.”

Let's make a deal.
Photographer: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

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With all eyes focused on the Republican struggle to replace Obamacare on Thursday, a federal agency (overseen by President Donald Trump) told the Trump Organization (overseen by President Donald Trump) that a Washington hotel (owned by President Donald Trump) could continue leasing the land it sits on from the federal government.

Leases can be nifty deals for real estate guys like Trump. They give builders the ability to comfortably pour hundreds of millions of dollars into erecting or rehabilitating a structure that they don’t own -- often also on land they don’t own -- confident that they can do business on the site long enough to earn piles of money from their investment.