IN 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........

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