Donald Trump touted his work overhauling one of his South Florida golf clubs in a newly released deposition he gave just two months before he entered the race for the White House.
In the deposition taken April 16, 2015, Trump describes buying a dilapidated luxury golf club — now known as Trump National Jupiter — and overhauling it, adding a ballroom, making various holes on the course “wider, bigger, longer, more effective.”
“The swimming pool, we have virtually redone the swimming pool and made it beautiful. It was very weak. We made it good,” Trump said. “We even re-did the tennis courts. They were very tired, and we built new tennis courts.”
Videos of Donald Trump’s and Eric Trump’s depositions were obtained by CNN this week through a court motion.
Members of the club are seeking $6 million from the Trumps, claiming the club kept collecting dues even after they ended their membership and were barred from entering the club. The Trumps bought the club from Ritz Carlton in 2012 and later instituted a new membership plan to help pay for renovations.
Eric Trump testified about how great the improvements were they made to the course.
“When we came into this club, you know, it was a bit of a sick puppy,” Eric Trump said. “The place was losing money, losing members. There was very little spirit at the club. Quite frankly, I think when we came in we rejuvenated a lot of that, we put a lot of capital investment in it.”
The case currently is awaiting a decision from the judge, which may not come until next months.
Donald Trump’s testimony came as he was considering his bid for the White House and it lacked much of the trademark bluster which helped him upend the Republican field and the 2016 campaign cycle.
Instead, Trump is casual and nonchalant throughout the 30-minute interview. It’s a marked change from his responses in another lawsuit involving his development of the Old Post Office Building just blocks from the White House.
Trump bragged, in that case, that his comments about Mexicans at the start of his campaign had actually helped his business and he accused the two celebrity chefs who backed out of restaurant deals there of trying to use him to grandstand.
The most notable case involving Trump, a lawsuit against Trump University, is not set for trial until after the election. In that case, it wasn’t Trump’s comments to lawyers that drew attention but instead his public allegation that the judge in the case could not be trusted because he was “Mexican.”
That comment threw his campaign into a tailspin for a few weeks at the start of the summer and led the Republican speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, to dub the quote as racist.