In September 2025, a group of environmental scientists and naturalists arrived at Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida, with binoculars and clipboards. For three days they catalogued bird species, bat calls, and plant varieties, then wrote it all up in a 180-page report. To anyone reading it, the property seemed like a pristine wildlife refuge. But the report barely mentioned what the project was really about: helping President Donald Trump get a massive tax break. At the time, Trump had a serious tax problem. His return to the White House, and his apparent eagerness to profit from it, had generated an estimated $1.4 billion in crypto earnings in 2025. His real estate empire added more than $200 million. His projected tax bill had snowballed to over $500 million. Enter the environmentalists. The U.S. tax code has a peculiar provision: you can reduce your taxes by giving up your right to develop your land, even if you keep owning it. The idea is that preserving open space is a charitable gift to the public. So Trump donated the right to develop the golf course to an environmental nonprofit, without giving up the club itself. For tax purposes, it became a nature preserve. For paying guests, it stayed a golf course. For everyone else, there was just a beige wall from the road. The maneuver has a certain plutocratic elegance—you protect the land from a luxury housing development that you invented only for appraisal. And if you think about it, the same logic would allow a Texas driveway owner to have the mineral rights under an oil stain appraised as a potential oilfield, donate the drilling rights to an anti-drilling charity, claim an $8 million deduction, keep the driveway, and strut around as the person who saved the neighborhood from drilling. That is the world Trump has learned to live in.
How much did this particular gift save him? The White House and the Trump Organization wouldn’t say. After studying similar deals and talking to eight industry experts, Forbes estimated the president could write off something around $825 million—give or take a couple hundred million. That is why Forbes increased its estimate of Trump’s net worth by $300 million. The Internal Revenue Service has historically challenged both parts of conservation easement deals, especially when the property is a golf course and when the appraised value seems absurdly high. Trump knows those arguments well; he has battled the IRS over them before. But now he has something no ordinary taxpayer has: power over the agency on the other side of the table. The Trump Organization donated the Jupiter easement in December 2025. A month later, Trump sued the IRS, claiming the agency had failed to protect his tax information during his first term. He was, in effect, both plaintiff and president—suing an agency inside the government he ran. When asked about the obvious conflict, he brushed it off: “Anything I win, I’m giving 100% to charity.” Then came the payoff. In May, a month after tax day, the Justice Department announced a settlement. It barred the government from pursuing any claims against Trump, his family, or his businesses arising from matters already pending—or that could be pending. Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress the agreement didn’t cover Trump’s 2025 tax returns. But a careful reading of “could be pending” suggests otherwise. That opens the possibility that Trump, who appeared to get an extension on his 2025 taxes, spent months pursuing the most aggressive tax strategy imaginable, believing the IRS could do nothing about it. As one tax attorney who specializes in conservation easements put it: “This explains so much about why he’s trying to get absolute IRS immunity. The whole thing makes sense now.”
None of this happened overnight. The strategy goes back more than twenty years, to a couch in Trump Tower and a self-described tree hugger named Ed Russo. Russo had chaired the planning board in Bedminster, New Jersey, and knew every environmental obstacle to building a golf club on the old DeLorean estate. Trump had just spent $8 million on the property and wanted to turn it into a club. He did not want to hear about wetlands or endangered species. “I’m worth $6 billion, and no little town like Bedford is going to tell me what to do,” Trump growled. “It isn’t Bedford, it’s Bedminster,” Russo replied. “And the most powerful man in the room is the one who has nothing to lose. That’s me.” Russo walked out. But Trump understood the value of turning adversaries into allies. He called a few weeks later and offered to put Russo in charge of the property’s environmental planning. Russo accepted. The golf club opened in 2004, the same year “The Apprentice” made Trump a national icon. By then, Russo had another idea: put a conservation easement on the Bedminster property and claim a huge tax deduction. Trump’s lawyers hated it. They doubted the IRS would accept the gift as a charitable deduction. But Trump, according to a Trump Organization insider, gathered his lawyers and called Russo. “Bull—-,” Russo told the legal team. “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 further develop Bedminster to the township. He claimed he was protecting the grasshopper sparrow and the bobolink—two birds whose habitats he was suddenly worried about. Six months later, on Trump’s 60th birthday, Russo handed him an appraisal valuing the easement at $39 million. That was enough to cut Trump’s tax bill by an estimated $14 million. Not bad for a property he had bought for just $8 million. Trump called it the greatest birthday present of his life. The IRS disagreed. The agency concluded the easement was worth zero, arguing that operating a golf course wasn’t an act of conservation. Trump fought back, and after years of litigation, the two sides reached a settlement. The IRS took a “slight haircut” on Trump’s deduction, according to a Trump Organization insider. The agency simply didn’t have the manpower for a full audit. Trump emerged emboldened.
After Bedminster, Trump ran the play again and again. From 2005 to 2025, he donated at least five conservation easements. In every case, he gave up development rights but kept the property. Forbes estimates those gifts could shelter more than $1 billion of income, saving him around $450 million in taxes. The biggest beneficiary of all this generosity was Donald Trump. At least two of the deals drew fraud allegations. In 2014 and 2015, Trump promised not to develop parts of properties in New York and California, and appraisers valued the donated rights at a combined $46 million. New York’s attorney general later alleged that the Trump Organization misled appraisers to inflate the donations. Trump’s sons denied the allegations; their father pleaded ignorance, even though evidence suggested he was involved. In the California deal—a twelve-acre driving range—Trump’s outside attorney warned his in-house counsel to 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,” attorney Sheri Dillon wrote. “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. A Congressional report in 2022 revealed that the IRS had spent years examining the New York easement. An agent’s notes listed two options: deny the entire $21 million deduction or slash it to $9 million, and perhaps impose a penalty for a wildly inaccurate valuation. When asked at his fraud trial in 2023 whether the inquiry was still active, Trump squirmed. “Not that I know of,” he said. “It might be.” Then came Doral, the 665-acre golf resort in south Florida. The property’s development rights were already restricted for another few years, but the Trump Organization offered the city a conservation easement on one of the four courses—if the deal closed by year-end. The city council held an emergency meeting. Ed Russo was there, warning of thousands of new hotel rooms if the deal fell through. The council accepted. With the help of a Texas appraiser, Trump secured a deduction of up to $323 million, more than twice what he had originally paid for the entire resort. In August 2025, a New York appeals court ruled that Trump had committed fraud for years by inflating his assets—but then, in an unusual twist, threw out the $500 million fine. The fraud finding stood. The penalty didn’t.
The Jupiter property, the one at the center of the latest deal, was formerly the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club. Trump bought it in 2012 for $5 million plus $49 million in liabilities. Today it’s worth an estimated $120 million. But if you appraise the land not as a golf course but as a future luxury subdivision, the numbers change dramatically. Local tax authorities value the land under nearby mansions at an average of $5.9 million per acre, according to Forbes. In Trump’s four earlier easement deals, he claimed development rights were worth, on average, 74 percent of the value of chopped-up lots in the neighborhood. Apply that logic here, and his deduction could be as high as $825 million. The recipient of this gift was the Barn Group Land Trust, a small nonprofit with a history of working with developers who like to push the limits of conservation easements. Forbes found six cases where developers who donated easements to the Barn Group later claimed deductions aggressive enough to attract IRS scrutiny. In one, developers allegedly bought 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. The Barn Group’s CEO, Thomas Krebs, said the nonprofit doesn’t get involved with appraisals and insisted its mission is to protect open space and farmland. But a former employee saw it differently. “I got into the environmental field to help things,” the ex-employee said. “On paper, it sounds like, ‘Oh, they’re going to conserve things. That’s great.’ But when you get down to brass tacks, it’s like, ‘Oh, we’re not really protecting anything. We’re just shielding rich people from taxes.’” Including one particularly powerful rich person. For Trump, the conservation easement is not just a tax shelter; it’s a way to use the language of environmentalism against itself. The report, the habitat, the birds, the nonprofit—all of it serves to convert a billionaire’s tax bill into an act of public charity. And if the IRS ever asks questions, the answer is always the same: it was a charitable gift.
Days before he returned to the presidency, Trump announced on Truth Social that Ed Russo would lead a new Environmental Advisory Task Force. “Together, we will achieve American Energy DOMINANCE, rebuild our Economy, and DRILL, BABY, DRILL,” Trump wrote. Russo, meanwhile, continued to work as a consultant for the Trump Organization. His current project involves conservation easements for the other three courses at Doral, which could theoretically shelter another billion dollars of income. Trump’s tax-immunity deal continued to draw outrage in Washington. A group of former IRS and Justice Department officials called it “breathtakingly improper.” Thirty-five former judges called the agreement “a product of collusion” and “a fraud on the court.” In July, a federal judge ruled that the lawsuit had been brought “to manipulate the judicial process.” Trump is appealing. Even if the courts ultimately reject the settlement, it’s hard to imagine anyone inside the executive branch wanting to scrutinize Trump’s tax filings too closely. A former IRS chief counsel executive said he wasn’t confident career employees would be allowed to do the right thing. In July, Kenneth Kies, the IRS’s acting chief counsel, resigned after reportedly clashing with the White House. Kies had warned that top officials could not legally ask the IRS to start or end investigations of individuals. He had also criticized abusive conservation easements, which have become so common that they’re clogging the U.S. Tax Court. Todd Blanche, on the other hand, stayed; the acting attorney general who signed off on Trump’s tax protection was confirmed permanently in August. So who benefits from all this, besides the president? The wealthy homeowners whose backyards now border preserved fairways. In Jupiter, one of them is Eric Trump, the president’s son. Another is Frank Bisignano, a financial executive. Late last year, as the Trump Organization was assembling the easement for that property, Bisignano took on a new job: chief executive officer of the IRS. It’s a fitting ending. The same tax code provision designed to protect nature has become a playground for the ultra-wealthy, and the people charged with policing it are increasingly the beneficiaries. Trump has turned conservation into a tax shelter, and the IRS—at least for now—is part of the landscape.
