One theory on why the consulting frees are important:

- If Trump were buying golf courses for himself, hoping to generate revenue and build asset value, the last thing he& #39;d want is to burden the project with unusually large fees for execs already on payroll who are heirs.

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- If, instead, Trump were buying properties for someone else, using his brand--such as it is--to mask the purchase, he& #39;d need a way to charge a fee.

- He can& #39;t pay himself a fee for a property he owns. But he can, apparently, pay Ivanka wildly large fees.

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- In his more traditional Oligarch-facing work (Baku, Batumi, Panama, Vancouver, Toronto, Indonesia, etc), he was only a service provider, charging a fee.

- With the Scottish and Irish courses and Doral, he did something new. He [claimed to] spend his own money.

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- One possibility: Trump had a huge amount of money with no obvious source and decided to blow it all on money-losing courses and to take what would have been his profits and give them to his daughter (he never liked giving money away to the kids).

Or....

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