In the spring of 2024, even as US President Donald Trump’s march back toward the White House dominated public attention, his finances, largely out of view, faced serious threats.

His office building in Lower Manhattan generated too little cash to cover its mortgage, with the balance coming due. Many of his golf courses regularly lacked enough players to cover costs. The flow of millions of dollars a year from his stint as a television celebrity had mostly dried up.

And a sudden wave of legal judgments threatened to devour all his cash.

Then, with his clinching of the Republican nomination, everything began to change.

In the following months, Mr Trump, along with his two eldest sons, Eric and Donald Jr., refocused the family business, forming a series of partnerships, especially in cryptocurrency, with investors who were willing to bank on his victory.

Once Trump won the presidency in November, that approach kicked into overdrive.

His family business announced numerous new deals that would financially benefit Mr Trump directly, even as he made policy decisions that affected those industries or that involved countries in which the United States had political interests. Most glaringly, Mr Trump is now both a partner in several crypto ventures and, as president, crypto’s chief policy regulator, and he has signalled that he wants his administration to have a hands-off approach to digital currencies.

Today, those moves are seen by Mr Trump’s detractors as a money grab of historic proportions. But an analysis by The New York Times of thousands of pages of internal Trump Organization documents filed in one of the legal actions against him suggests a more urgent motivation for Mr Trump’s behaviour: a need, rather than simply a desire, for easy money to keep his empire intact.

In late 2023, Mr Trump boasted of having between US$300 million (S$382 million) and $400 million in cash when he testified as part of that legal action, a lawsuit brought by the New York attorney general that accused the Trumps of defrauding their lenders. His ca...