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'd want is to burden the project with unusually large fees for execs already on payroll who are heirs.

1/

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

- He can't pay himself a fee for a property he owns. But he can, apparently, pay Ivanka wildly large fees.

2/

- 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.

3/

- 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....

4/