It’s already been reported that Trump’s leisure and hospitality businesses suffered mightily over the course of 2020 thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the drops in his royalties from film and television can’t be as easily explained the same way. During his first three years in office, Trump received an annual payment in the seven figure range courtesy of Trump Productions’ 50 percent stake in “The Apprentice” – the highest being in 2018, when he got more than $2 million in royalties from the show. But in 2020, he got just $275,000, a drop that THR speculates is “likely tied to syndication rights and reruns for the reality show.” “The Apprentice” was always Trump’s highest-paying showbiz job, but his income from his former days as a cameo artist saw drops in 2020 as well. In 2019, for instance, he earned $1,000 for royalties from “The Little Rascals,” which in 2020 dropped to $205. This may be a sign of things to come for the former president, whose presidency made him something of a radioactive figure who likely won’t be able to return to NBC or mainstream feature films (outside the right-wing media ecosphere) in the future. You might not expect Trump’s book sales to suffer in the same way his film and TV appearances did, but the financial disclosure shows his income from his work as an author has cratered as well. In 2017 he earned a million dollars in royalties from two books, “The Art of the Deal” and “Time to Get Tough,” and another tome entitled “Crippled America” earned him somewhere between $1 million and $5 million. In 2020, his most famous book “The Art of the Deal” continued to earn him somewhere from $100,000 to $1 million, but THR says that “none of his other 14 books generated any meaningful income” over the course of the year.
