Bat calls, bird counts, a 180-page report and a promise never to build on the fairways add up, by Forbes’ estimate, to an $825m write-off on a Jupiter club the Trump Organization still owns.
2005
Donald Trump learned early that a promise not to build can be worth more than the building. Forbes has counted at least five conservation easements donated on his land since 2005. The first covered ground at Bedminster, New Jersey, and the method has barely changed since.
The rule is old, legal and generous. According to the IRS’s own audit guide, a conservation easement that meets every statutory and regulatory requirement, substantiation included, can be claimed as a charitable contribution deduction. The gift must go to an organisation described in section 170(c) of the tax code. Its value is the fair market value of the easement at the time of the gift, set in a qualified appraisal by a qualified appraiser. In practice that means the land’s value before the promise, less its value after. On a field of cabbages the gap is modest. On ground that could otherwise hold houses, the gap is the whole story.
Call it a loophole in the strict sense: a gap in the rules that any landowner may use lawfully, provided they meet the tests. The tests are where the money is.
2009
Golf entered the case law four years later, in Alabama. In Kiva Dunes, a dispute over an easement on a golf course, the IRS conceded after trial that the owner was entitled to a deduction, and the Tax Court was left to settle only the size of it. It valued the easement at $28,656,004, against $30.6m claimed. For anyone owning fairways, the lesson of Alabama was that the argument would be about the number. Rarely has a concession been priced to the dollar.
The Eleventh Circuit later put the case in its place. Because the IRS had not opposed the deduction, the court said, Kiva Dunes carried little weight as precedent. It added that the case remained consistent with golf-course easements qualifying when they met the usual standards.
Those standards come from the statute. An easement can protect a relatively natural habitat of fish, wildlife or plants, or a similar ecosystem. It can also preserve open space for the scenic enjoyment of the public. Courts have accepted golf-course easements that meet those tests.
2012
Trump bought Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida, in 2012. Forbes puts the price at $5m plus about $49m in liabilities. That is the sort of bargain that only looks small until you read the second number.
Three figures now attach to the club, and they should never be allowed to blur. The first is that cost, about $54m all in. The second is Forbes’ estimate of what the club is worth as a working golf course, about $120m. The third is hypothetical: what the ground might fetch if the fairways became building plots. Forbes puts the land beneath the mansions surrounding the course at an average of $5.9m an acre.
The distance between the second and third figures is the space in which an easement lives. A course valued as a course is worth what members will pay to play it. The same acres valued as plots are worth what buyers will pay to live beside the mansions already standing.
Golf courses are large. That last figure does the work.
September 2025
Staff from an environmental nonprofit arrived at the Jupiter club in September 2025. They spent three days looking for bird species, recording bat calls and cataloguing plant varieties, then wrote up what they had found in a 180-page report.
“The 180-pager made the case that Trump’s golf course qualified as a natural habitat worth protecting,” Dan Alexander wrote in Forbes.
Every easement needs its conservation purpose on paper, and the statute’s habitat test is the one a golf course has to pass. A bat survey sounds an eccentric way to spend three days at a golf club. For a deduction that turns on proving habitat, it is the evidence. Most clubs keep a members’ handbook. Jupiter acquired a natural history.
December 2025
The gift came in December 2025. The Trump Organization donated the development rights at Jupiter to the Barn Group Land Trust, a nonprofit, and kept the club. The course, the clubhouse and the Trump name on the gates stayed exactly where they were. What left was the right ever to carve the fairways into house lots. Permanence is one of the requirements, so the promise is meant to outlast the people who made it.
A gift of that size comes with strict paperwork. Under the IRS instructions for Form 8283, any deduction above $500,000 needs the qualified appraisal attached to the return, signed and dated by a qualified appraiser no earlier than 60 days before the contribution. Trump’s return is not public. Whatever has been claimed, if anything, is known only to those who prepared and filed it.
19 October 2026
Forbes published the investigation on 19 October 2026 under the headline “How Trump Turned His Golf Empire Into A Billion-Dollar Tax Shelter”. Dan Alexander, a senior editor at the magazine, wrote it.
Forbes reached its figure in two steps. It studied similar deals and spoke to eight industry experts, and concluded that the write-off could be something like $825m, give or take a couple hundred million. The method borrows from Trump’s own record. On his four earlier easements, Forbes says, he valued the development rights at an average of 74% of what chopped-up lots in the neighbourhood were worth. Apply the same ratio to Jupiter’s acreage and the deduction, by Forbes’ estimate, reaches as high as $825m.
Set against the other numbers, the estimate stands out. At the top of Forbes’ range, the deduction would be around fifteen times what the club cost and nearly seven times what Forbes thinks it is worth as a working course.
The income side explains the appetite. Forbes calculates Trump’s 2025 income at about $1.4bn from crypto and more than $200m from property, which implies a tax bill above $500m. A deduction reduces taxable income, which is a smaller thing than cutting the bill dollar for dollar. Even so, Forbes raised its estimate of his fortune by $300m on the expected tax savings.
Across all five easements since 2005, Forbes says, more than $1bn of income could be sheltered and an estimated $450m of tax saved. Twenty years of not building, on that reckoning, have been among the better-performing assets in the portfolio.
The White House and the Trump Organization did not respond to Forbes.
20 to 25 October 2026
The story travelled quickly. uPolitics ran it as a loophole story, Unusual Whales wrote it up, Trendsfocus carried it on 24 October and Attack of the Fanboy on 25 October. Several retellings slid from “could write off” to “saved”, which Forbes never said. Its figure is an estimate with a margin of a couple of hundred million either way. A margin that wide reflects the fact that no outsider has seen the appraisal.
What survives the retelling is the rule, and it belongs to any landowner who qualifies. The requirements are a qualified land trust, a qualified appraisal, a genuine conservation purpose and permanence, all under the eye of an IRS that scrutinises these gifts closely. Most owners of a back nine have never asked whether the rough counts as wildlife habitat.
Someone in Jupiter spent three days finding out. Forbes prices the answer at up to $825m.
