I N SEPTEMBER 2025 , staff from an environmental nonprofit descended on Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida. Over three days, they looked for the kind of things that excite naturalists—bird species, bat calls, plant varieties—then recorded their discoveries in a 180-page report. It barely mentioned the thing they were really looking for: a tax break for Donald Trump.

The president needed one, desperately. Trump’s return to the White House, and his eagerness to profit from it, yielded $1.4 billion of crypto earnings in 2025. His real-estate empire supplied more than $200 million on top of that, according to Forbes calculations. The president’s projected tax bill snowballed to over $500 million.

Enter the environmentalists. Among the many peculiarities of the U.S. tax code is a provision allowing landowners to cut their bills by giving up development rights—even if they retain the land itself. The premise is straightforward: Forgoing development can preserve natural habitats, a public benefit that can qualify as a charitable gift. The 180-pager made the case that Trump’s golf course qualified as a natural habitat worth protecting. He then donated the right to further develop it to an environmental nonprofit—without giving up ownership of the golf club itself.

The maneuver has a certain plutocratic elegance: For tax purposes, Trump National becomes an environmental preserve. For paying guests, it remains a golf club. And for the public footing the bill? A view of a beige wall from the road.

Nothing says environmental virtue like protecting land from a housing development you invented just for an appraisal.

To put a finer point on it, apply the same logic to a Texas driveway. You have the mineral rights beneath an oil stain there appraised as a potential oilfield, donate the drilling rights to an anti-drilling environmental charity and claim an $8 million deduction. You keep your driveway, that oil stain and the car that may or may not have made it. Your neighbor still pays to store his boat there. And now you get to peacock around the neighborhood as the guy who stopped the drilling.

How much did such legerdemain save the president? Spokespeople for the White House and the Trump Organization ignored that question and others. It’s difficult to put a number on it. But after studying similar deals from the past and speaking with eight industry experts, Forbes believes the president could end up writing off something like $825 million, give or take a couple hundred million. The expected tax savings prompted us to increase our estimate of Trump’s fortune by $300 million.

In times past, the Internal Revenue Service has challenged both parts of this sort of deal, known as a conservation easement: that golf courses, hardly known for their environmental friendliness, qualify as nature preserves, and that surrendered development rights are worth what owners say. Donald Trump knows these arguments well. He has battled the IRS on both.

Now he has something no ordinary taxpayer can claim: power over the government on the other side of the table. The Trump Organization donated the easement in December 2025. A month later, Trump sued the IRS, alleging that the agency failed to protect his tax information during his first term in office. He was both plaintiff and president, suing an agency inside the government he ran. The president brushed aside the obvious conflict of interest. “Anything I win, I’m giving 100% to charity,” he said.

Then came the payoff. In May, one month after the April 15 tax deadline passed, the Justice Department released the settlement of Trump’s IRS lawsuit. The agreement barred the government from pursuing any claims against Trump, his family and their business arising from matters already pending, or that could be pending.

Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress the agreement does not cover the president’s 2025 tax returns, but a careful reading of the “could be pending” language suggests the opposite. That opens the possibility that Trump, who appears to have gotten an extension on his 2025 taxes, could have pursued the most aggressive tax strategy imaginable over the last few months—believing the IRS could do nothing about it.

“This explains so much about why he’s trying to get absolute IRS immunity,” says a tax attorney who specializes in conservation easements. “The whole thing makes sense now.”

M ORE THAN 20 years ago, Donald Trump sat on a couch in his Trump Tower apartment alongside Edward Russo, a self-described tree hugger who once chaired the planning board of Bedminster Township, New Jersey. Trump, who spent $8 million buying the old estate of car tycoon John DeLorean, wanted to turn the property into a Bedminster golf club. Russo was there to explain the environmental obstacles.

His host did not appreciate the lesson. “I’m worth $6 billion, and no little town like Bedford is going to tell me what to do,” Trump said to Russo, who later recounted the interaction in a self-published memoir.

“It isn’t Bedford, it’s Bedminster,” Russo responded. “And the most powerful man in the room is the one who has nothing to lose. That’s me.”

Russo left without saying goodbye. Trump, who has long understood the power of turning adversaries into allies, called a couple weeks later. “I’m going to build a golf course, and if the only way I can do it is to adhere to your rules, then I’ll send you a contract you won’t be able to refuse,” he said, according to Russo. “I’m putting you in charge of the property.” Russo accepted. The golf club opened in 2004.

The same year, “The Apprentice” debuted, kicking off an income stream that eventually reached hundreds of millions of dollars. Russo, hoping to limit further development on the golf club, came to Trump with an idea: Put a conservation easement over the Bedminster property, then donate an easement to the township and claim a deduction.

Trump’s attorneys looked at the plan and didn’t like it, doubting Trump could secure the tax benefit. So the future president, according to a Trump Organization insider, assembled the lawyers and called up Russo. “Bull----,” Russo told the legal team, saying he had done this sort of thing before and spouting off about how attorneys never commit to anything. “That’s enough for me,” Trump said. “I want everybody to get out of Ed’s way.”

On December 29, 2005, Trump donated the right to any further development to the township of Bedminster. The president, whose administration moved this year to strip endangered species of habitat protections, claimed he was protecting the habitats of two birds, the grasshopper sparrow and the bobolink.

About six months later, on Trump’s 60 th birthday, Russo delivered what the boss really wanted: an appraisal valuing the easement at $39 million, enough to reduce Trump’s tax bill by an estimated $14 million. Not bad, considering Trump had purchased the entire property—development rights and all—for just $8 million and the assumption of some obligations to members. Trump said it was the greatest birthday present of his life.

But the IRS came to a different conclusion for what the writeoff was worth: zero. Operating a golf course, the government argued, was not an act of conservation, certainly not one worth $39 million.

Trump fought the agency for years, according to documents uncovered by Forbes . Neither the Trump Organization nor the IRS responded to questions about the dispute. But the documents indicate that settlement discussions extended to at least 2011, and a Trump Organization insider says the two sides ultimately reached a deal. The IRS, says the source, took a slight haircut off Trump’s deduction, as they typically did in conservation-easement disputes during those days.

“They have manpower issues,” explains Cal Bomar, who worked at the agency in the early 2000s. “Doing an audit would be impossible. So they didn’t really have a choice but to compromise.”

Trump emerged emboldened. He had stumbled into a tax strategy tailored for someone like him—sitting on vast acreage, comfortable inflating asset values, willing to take on the IRS. The playbook was simple. Environmentalists documented a property’s conservation value. An appraiser calculated what the land might fetch as luxury lots, then subtracted some expenses and the residual value of the property. Trump donated the right to build, claimed a charitable deduction and kept the business. It was a tax shelter landscaped to look like charity.

After Bedminster, Trump pursued the strategy again. And again. And again.

From 2005 to 2025, Trump donated at least five conservation easements, in all cases forfeiting development rights without surrendering ownership. Including the Jupiter deal, Forbes estimates those gifts could shelter more than $1 billion of income, enough to save an estimated $450 million in taxes. The biggest beneficiary of this generosity: Donald Trump.

At least two of the deals led to fraud allegations. In 2014 and 2015, Trump promised not to develop portions of properties in New York and California, securing appraisals that valued the donated rights at a combined $46 million. As part of her broader case over inflated Trump property values, New York’s attorney general alleged that the Trump Organization misled appraisers on both assignments to supersize its donations. Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump denied the allegations, while their father pleaded ignorance, even though there’s ample evidence he was involved.

On the California deal, which protected a 12-acre driving range, Trump’s outside attorney suggested his in-house counsel emphasize discretion. “Remind him that the larger the value and the more he makes of it, then he is telling the world how large a tax deduction he is taking for it,” wrote attorney Sheri Dillon, according to court records. “In this case, this is tantamount to the U.S. taxpayers paying Donald Trump to keep his driving range and use it for exactly what he is already using it for.”

Trump held a press conference anyway.

The threat of scrutiny was more than theoretical. According to a Congressional report released in 2022, the IRS examined the New York conservation easement for years. An agent jotted down two possibilities for how to handle it: deny the entire $21 million deduction or slash it to $9 million. The agent’s notes, cited in the congressional report, also mentioned the possibility of imposing a penalty assessed to taxpayers who use wildly inaccurate valuations. By 2022, the inquiry was still ongoing. When asked whether it remained active the following year, Trump squirmed. “Not that I know of,” he said on the witness stand at his fraud trial. “It might be.”

W ITH THE TAX issues brewing, Trump made one of the best deals of his life. His Washington, D.C. hotel, situated on the same block as the IRS headquarters, had been bleeding money for years. But in 2022, when the country was still delirious from Covid, an investment shop purchased the 263-room property for $375 million, the highest price per room anyone had ever paid in the nation’s capital. Trump walked away with a pile of cash and a new tax headache.

His antidote lay in south Florida, where the president owns a roughly 665-acre golf resort named Trump National Doral. Development of the property was already restricted under a 20-year-agreement, with a handful of years remaining on it. Manufacturing urgency, the Trump Organization offered the city of Doral a conservation easement on one of the resort’s four courses—but only if the deal wrapped up by year-end. The city council called an emergency meeting, and a familiar face showed up. Ed Russo.

“This deal ends in two weeks,” Russo told the city council members, dangling the threat of thousands of new hotel rooms. “There’s nothing else we want. It’s strictly something that the Trump family has done in other courses. And this is a natural order of business for Donald Trump.” The city council accepted. With the help of a Texas appraiser whom the president later listed as a possible witness in his New York fraud trial, Trump secured a deduction of up to $323 million—more than twice what he originally paid for the entire resort.

Before leaving, Russo underscored that the property also included three other courses and said he had been cleared to work on easements for those as well. “It’s just amazing that the Trump family has authorized us to move forward,” he said. “It’s going to take me time, but I’ll be back.”

Trump’s run of good luck was only beginning. In August 2025, a New York appeals court declared that the president had committed fraud for years by inflating the value of his assets. But, in an unusual twist, the court simultaneously threw out a previous half-billion dollar fine imposed on Trump. The fraud finding stood. The penalty did not.

Within weeks, the president’s firm was zeroing in on another conservation easement—this time, over the Jupiter, Florida property. Formerly known as the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club, Trump purchased the place in 2012 for $5 million and the assumption of $49 million in liabilities. It’s now worth an estimated $120 million. Appraise the land as potential luxury housing, however, and the arithmetic changes. Local authorities value the ground underneath mansions surrounding the course at an average of $5.9 million per acre, according to a Forbes analysis. On Trump’s four earlier easement deals, he claimed the development rights were worth an average of 74% of the value of chopped-up lots in the neighborhood. Apply that same logic to the Jupiter deal, and his deduction could reach $825 million.

The recipient of Trump’s latest gift was the Barn Group Land Trust, a nonprofit that had done business with a pal of Eric Trump’s. Its website emphasizes environmental protection. Its tax-court footprint, however, suggests a less-charitable specialty. Forbes uncovered six cases in which developers, including Eric’s buddy, donated conservation easements to the Barn Group and then claimed tax deductions aggressive enough to get the attention of the IRS. In one, developers allegedly purchased a property for $900,000, then claimed the donated easement was worth $61 million. In another, investors turned a $1.5 million property into a $149 million donation.

Barn Group Chief Executive Thomas Krebs said in a statement that his nonprofit doesn’t get involved with appraisals and insisted its mission is to protect open spaces, habitats, farmland and historic properties.

Not everyone is buying it. “I got into the environmental field to help things,” says a former Barn Group employee. “On paper, it sounds like, ‘Oh, they’re going to conserve things. That’s great.’ But the brass tacks hits, it’s like, ‘Oh, we’re not really like protecting anything. We’re just shielding rich people from taxes.’”

Including one particularly powerful rich person.

D AYS BEFORE HE returned to the presidency, Donald Trump logged onto Truth Social. “I am pleased to announce that Ed Russo, an Environmental Expert, will lead our Environmental Advisory Task Force, which will advise my Administration on initiatives to create great jobs and protect our natural resources, by following my policy of CLEAN AIR and CLEAN WATER,” the president wrote. “Together, we will achieve American Energy DOMINANCE, rebuild our Economy, and DRILL, BABY, DRILL.”

While he serves, Russo continues to work as a consultant for the Trump Organization. His current project, plugging away on easements for the three other Doral courses, could theoretically shelter another billion dollars.

Meanwhile, Trump’s tax-immunity deal continues to turn heads in Washington. “Breathtakingly improper,” declared a group of former IRS and Justice Department officials. Thirty-five ex-judges called the agreement “a product of collusion” and “a fraud on the court.” In July, the U.S. district judge overseeing the case ruled that it had been brought “to manipulate the judicial process.” The president is appealing.

Even if the courts ultimately overrule Trump, it seems unlikely that anyone in the executive branch will want to look too closely at his tax filings. “I’ve got a lot of friends who are career IRS, and I think they’re trying to do the right thing, but I don’t know what marching orders you get,” says a former IRS chief counsel executive. “I guess I don’t have confidence that they’re able to do the right thing.”

In July, news broke that Kenneth Kies, the IRS’s acting chief counsel, was leaving. The Wall Street Journal reported that he had clashed with the White House after warning that top officials could not legally ask the IRS to conduct or end a probe of any individual. Kies had also criticized abusive conservation easements, which have become such a widespread problem that industry insiders say they’re beginning to clog the docket of the U.S. Tax Court. Blanche, on the other hand, stayed. The acting attorney general who signed off Trump’s tax protection took on the role permanently in August.

Who benefits from Trump’s conservation easements, other than the president? The wealthy homeowners whose yards back up to now-preserved fairways. In Jupiter, one of them is Eric Trump, the president’s son. Another is financial executive Frank Bisignano.

Late last year, as the Trump Organization was putting together the easement for that property, Bisignano took on a new job—chief executive officer of the IRS.