18 Revelations From a Trove of Trump Tax Records

[ZiprHead]

Times reporters have obtained decades of tax information the president has hidden from public view. Here are some of the key findings.

The New York Times has obtained tax-return data for President Trump and his companies that covers more than two decades. Mr. Trump has long refused to release this information, making him the first president in decades to hide basic details about his finances. His refusal has made his tax returns among the most sought-after documents in recent memory.

Among the key findings of The Times’s investigation:

Mr. Trump paid no federal income taxes in 11 of 18 years that The Times examined. In 2017, after he became president, his tax bill was only $750.

He has reduced his tax bill with questionable measures, including a $72.9 million tax refund that is the subject of an audit by the Internal Revenue Service.

Many of his signature businesses, including his golf courses, report losing large amounts of money — losses that have helped him to lower his taxes.

The financial pressure on him is increasing as hundreds of millions of dollars in loans he personally guaranteed are soon coming due.

Even while declaring losses, he has managed to enjoy a lavish lifestyle by taking tax deductions on what most people would consider personal expenses, including residences, aircraft and $70,000 in hairstyling for television.

Much more in the link.

 

[hurtinbuckaroo]

More incentive for him to stay in office by any means. He’s toast without immunity.

 

[Trausti]

Russia contacts? Oh, yeah. Never mind.

 

[ZiprHead]

Russia contacts? Oh, yeah. Never mind.

Oh, that's right. Conservatives are unable to carry two thoughts in their head at the same time.

 

[crazyfingers]

Russia contacts? Oh, yeah. Never mind.

The forms don't say who he owes that $300 million to. They don't name any of his lenders.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Russia contacts? Oh, yeah. Never mind.

The forms don't say who he owes that $300 million to. They don't name any of his lenders.

I think Trausti is saying libs WERE harping on Russia! Russia! Russia! But today's fad is Taxes! Taxes! Taxes! and that somehow this lessens the credibility of the claims.

 

[Rhea]

It’s an interesting look at his finances. Presumably any losses you use to write off gains means that overall you are not earning any money - you’re living off savings.

Unless yu aer somehow cheating, and the losses are not losses, and that money goes into your pockets, like when you give it to your daughter as a fee to consult for the company she works for. Or if you somehow pay your “vendors” but your vendors are you.

So if he is not cheating, then he has had no income for 10 years and is burning through his assets, in debt up to his orange neck. And if he is cheating, then he’s a looser AND a crook. I think the evidence points to the latter.

 

[laughing dog]

Russia contacts? Oh, yeah. Never mind.

The forms don't say who he owes that $300 million to. They don't name any of his lenders.

I think Trausti is saying libs WERE harping on Russia! Russia! Russia! But today's fad is Taxes! Taxes! Taxes! and that somehow this lessens the credibility of the claims.

His tax situation is only coming out now because of his stalling has almost come to an end. It would have come out much sooner without his legal evasions.

 

[lpetrich]

The New York Times on Twitter: "Exclusive: The Times has obtained tax-return data for President Trump extending over more than two decades. It shows his finances under stress, beset by losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes and hundreds of millions in debt coming due. https://t.co/gstfYLEe5V" / Twitter
noting
Trump’s Taxes Show Chronic Losses and Years of Income Tax Avoidance - The New York Times

Ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life.

“The Apprentice,” along with the licensing and endorsement deals that flowed from his expanding celebrity, brought Mr. Trump a total of $427.4 million, The Times’s analysis of the records found. He invested much of that in a collection of businesses, mostly golf courses, that in the years since have steadily devoured cash — much as the money he secretly received from his father financed a spree of quixotic overspending that led to his collapse in the early 1990s.

Indeed, his financial condition when he announced his run for president in 2015 lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name.

...
Most of Mr. Trump’s core enterprises — from his constellation of golf courses to his conservative-magnet hotel in Washington — report losing millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars year after year.

His revenue from “The Apprentice” and from licensing deals is drying up, and several years ago he sold nearly all the stocks that now might have helped him plug holes in his struggling properties.

The tax audit looms.

And within the next four years, more than $300 million in loans — obligations for which he is personally responsible — will come due.

Seems like he's headed for another bankruptcy. Will he be begging for a bailout when it happens? Who would want to bail him out?

 

[lpetrich]

Mr. Trump’s elaborate dance and defiance have only stoked suspicion about what secrets might lie hidden in his taxes. Is there a financial clue to his deference to Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin? Did he write off as a business expense the hush-money payment to the pornographic film star Stormy Daniels in the days before the 2016 election? Did a covert source of money feed his frenzy of acquisition that began in the mid-2000s?

...
To delve into the records is to see up close the complex structure of the president’s business interests — and the depth of his entanglements. What is popularly known as the Trump Organization is in fact a collection of more than 500 entities, virtually all of them wholly owned by Mr. Trump, many carrying his name. For example, 105 of them are a variation of the name Trump Marks, which he uses for licensing deals.

...
While Mr. Trump crisscrossed the country in 2015 describing himself as uniquely qualified to be president because he was “really rich” and had “built a great company,” his accountants back in New York were busy putting the finishing touches on his 2014 tax return.

After tabulating all the profits and losses from Mr. Trump’s various endeavors on Form 1040, the accountants came to Line 56, where they had to enter the total income tax the candidate was required to pay. They needed space for only a single figure.

Zero.

That was the 4th year of not paying any Federal income taxes.

The collective and persistent losses he reported from them largely absolved him from paying federal income taxes on the $600 million from “The Apprentice,” branding deals and investments.

That equation is a key element of the alchemy of Mr. Trump’s finances: using the proceeds of his celebrity to purchase and prop up risky businesses, then wielding their losses to avoid taxes.

Throughout his career, Mr. Trump’s business losses have often accumulated in sums larger than could be used to reduce taxes on other income in a single year. But the tax code offers a workaround: With some restrictions, business owners can carry forward leftover losses to reduce taxes in future years.

...
Mr. Trump was periodically required to pay a parallel income tax called the alternative minimum tax, created as a tripwire to prevent wealthy people from using huge deductions, including business losses, to entirely wipe out their tax liabilities.

Mr. Trump paid alternative minimum tax in seven years between 2000 and 2017 — a total of $24.3 million, excluding refunds he received after filing. For 2015, he paid $641,931, his first payment of any federal income tax since 2010.

...
House Democrats who have been in hot pursuit of Mr. Trump’s tax returns most likely have no idea that at least some of the records are sitting in a congressional office building. George Yin, a former chief of staff for the joint committee, said that any identifying information about taxpayers under review was tightly held among a handful of staff lawyers and was rarely shared with politicians assigned to the committee.

...
Rather, there appears to be a closer-to-home explanation for at least some of the fees: Mr. Trump reduced his taxable income by treating a family member as a consultant, and then deducting the fee as a cost of doing business.

 

[lpetrich]

About Ivanka Trump,

On Ms. Trump’s now-defunct website, which explains her role at the Trump Organization, she was not identified as a consultant. Rather, she has been described as a senior executive who “actively participates in all aspects of both Trump and Trump branded projects, including deal evaluation, predevelopment planning, financing, design, construction, sales and marketing, and ensuring that Trump’s world-renowned physical and operational standards are met.

“She is involved in all decisions — large and small.”

Private jets, country clubs and mansions have all had a role in the selling of Donald Trump.

“I play to people’s fantasies,” he wrote in “Trump: The Art of the Deal.” “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.”

...
Mr. Trump has written off as business expenses costs — including fuel and meals — associated with his aircraft, used to shuttle him among his various homes and properties. Likewise the cost of haircuts, including the more than $70,000 paid to style his hair during “The Apprentice.” Together, nine Trump entities have written off at least $95,464 paid to a favorite hair and makeup artist of Ivanka Trump.

...
The ethical quandaries created by Mr. Trump’s decision to keep his business while in the White House have been documented. But the full financial measure of his extraordinary confluence of interests — a president with a wealth of business entanglements at home and in myriad geopolitical hot spots — has remained elusive.

Then about Trump's Florida estate.

One Trump enterprise that has been regularly profitable, and is a persistent source of concern about ethical conflicts and national security lapses, is the Mar-a-Lago club. Profits there rose sharply after Mr. Trump declared his candidacy, as courtiers eagerly joining up brought a tenfold rise in cash from initiation fees — from $664,000 in 2014 to just under $6 million in 2016, even before Mr. Trump doubled the cost of initiation in January 2017. The membership rush allowed the president to take $26 million out of the business from 2015 through 2018, nearly triple the rate at which he had paid himself in the prior two years.

Some of the largest payments from business groups for events or conferences at Mar-a-Lago and other Trump properties have come since Mr. Trump became president, the tax records show.

 

[lpetrich]

New York Times' Trump Tax Returns Investigation: 18 Revelations - The New York Times
I have turned that article's section titles into lists.

• The president’s tax avoidance
  • Mr. Trump has paid no federal income taxes for much of the past two decades.
  • This tax avoidance sets him apart from most other affluent Americans.
  • His tax avoidance also sets him apart from past presidents.
  • A large refund has been crucial to his tax avoidance.
  • The $72.9 million refund has since become the subject of a long-running battle with the I.R.S.
• Business expenses and personal benefits
  • Mr. Trump classifies much of the spending on his personal lifestyle as the cost of business.
  • Seven Springs, his estate in Westchester County, N.Y., typifies his aggressive definition of business expenses.
• The ‘consulting fees’
  • Across nearly all of his projects, Mr. Trump’s companies set aside about 20 percent of income for unexplained ‘consulting fees.’
  • His daughter appears to have received some of these consulting fees, despite having been a top Trump Organization executive.
• Money-losing businesses
  • Many of the highest-profile Trump businesses lose large amounts of money.
  • The most successful part of the Trump business has been his personal brand.
  • But his unprofitable companies still served a financial purpose: reducing his tax bill.
• Large bills looming
  • With the cash from ‘The Apprentice,’ Mr. Trump went on his biggest buying spree since the 1980s.
  • His 2016 presidential campaign may have been partly an attempt to resuscitate his brand.
  • The presidency has helped his business.
  • But the presidency has not resolved his core financial problem: Many of his businesses continue to lose money.
  • He will soon face several major bills that could put further pressure on his finances.
  • He is personally on the hook for some of these bills.

What a failure he is.

 

[lpetrich]

Charting an Empire: A Timeline of Trump’s Finances - The New York Times - "Tax records provide a detailed history of President Trump’s business career, revealing huge losses, looming financial threats and a large, contested refund from the I.R.S."

An Editor’s Note on the Trump Tax Investigation - The New York Times - "The New York Times has examined decades of President Trump’s financial records, assembling the most comprehensive picture yet of his business dealings."

We are publishing this report because we believe citizens should understand as much as possible about their leaders and representatives — their priorities, their experiences and also their finances. Every president since the mid-1970s has made his tax information public. The tradition ensures that an official with the power to shake markets and change policy does not seek to benefit financially from his actions.

Mr. Trump, one of the wealthiest presidents in the nation’s history, has broken with that practice. As a candidate and as president, Mr. Trump has said he wanted to make his tax returns public, but he has never done so. In fact, he has fought relentlessly to hide them from public view and has falsely asserted that he could not release them because he was being audited by the Internal Revenue Service. More recently, Mr. Trump and the Justice Department have fought subpoenas from congressional and New York State investigators seeking his taxes and other financial records.

 

[Keith&Co.]

I wonder if his refusal to divest businesses upon election was not greed, but the only way to ensure he kept contol of the books, Trying to hide the truth another 8 years...?

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I wonder if his refusal to divest businesses upon election was not greed, but the only way to ensure he kept contol of the books, Trying to hide the truth another 8 years...?

He is a real estate guy... or was a real estate guy. He owns golf courses that lose money, and gets paid to slap his name on buildings. So when it comes to the real estate, there is no real way to divest as he'd need to sell it . And that admittedly would take time.

I think what we see is that Trump has no cash money at all. He requires businesses to give him and his family a cash flow, even if they are losing overall. Trump seems to be way past the point you are supposed to reboot the business video game because he has $400 million in debt and roughly $0 in cash reserves. Usually he declares bankruptcy at this point, but I'm not certain he has that option.

 

[Elixir]

Russia contacts? Oh, yeah. Never mind.

The only comment from a local "I'm not a Trumpsucker".
Such a surprise.
Thank you for weighing in, Trausti. There are so many trolls about, it's really courageous of you to demonstrate that you're not one of them.

 

[funinspace]

Holy Zeus...Don the Con is...a...Con? But. yeah additional solid evidence is nice.

 

[Elixir]

I think what we see is that Trump has no cash money at all.

I think that what we see is a guy who owes hundreds of million if not billions to undisclosed foreign entities, and has tweaked every aspect of the US tax code to try to alleviate some of that debt.
THAT MUCH WAS APPARENT FROM HIS FIRST YEAR IN OFFICE (as I and others pointed out, to the ridicule of our closet trumpsuckers).
The few entities that have provided income for him without losses that more than offset it (e.g. the Russian Miss Universe pageant and Turkey's remittance of royalty fees), appear to have influenced military decisions that have benefited those entities.

Usually he declares bankruptcy at this point, but I'm not certain he has that option.

Yup, that's a bigass problem for the big ass. He didn't plan to get elected. But once he did, he saw that the only thing he had to fear was the DOJ, so he started casting around for a toady and with Moscow Mitch's help he finally got one installed. I'm sure he felt like he was home free at that point, with full control over who could learn what about his financial shenanigans. Most of it's legal anyhow. There are no laws about Presidents not being beholden to foreign dictators, so the only liability is with his base. Which is rock solid, at least from the neck up.

 

[Deepak]

Russia contacts? Oh, yeah. Never mind.

Well, yes. Look - I know it's difficult to formulate real opinions, and therefore the mental shortcut of simply regurgitating the right-wing privy is easy, but honestly I could go to the source for that.

I'll afford you the illiteracy and willful blindness that's required to ignore this and this and this:

Show

Forget all that.

Let's just think of the effects that this debt would have on someone with a security clearance. One of the primary things that are checked when someone gets access to secure information, whether that's someone who is close to raw credit data, a member of the military getting access to military secrets, or a contractor for the CIA, one of the things that will be reviewed is the person's debt, specifically because a large amount of debt makes someone liable to do desperate things - and the higher that amount is the more liable they are to be influenced by a foreign entity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedict_Arnold
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames

Indeed, CBP probably would deny your application for Global Entry if you had debts like Trump does. This is a huge red flag for anyone regardless of past behavior, specifically regardless of behavior like: THE TRUMPS' OWN STATEMENTS SAYING THEY WERE FINANCIALLY OBLIGATED TO RUSSIANS.

 

[lpetrich]

A Mar-a-Lago Weekend and an Act of God: Trump’s History With Deutsche Bank - The New York Times

Mr. Trump and Deutsche Bank were deeply entwined, their symbiotic bond born of necessity and ambition on both sides: a real estate mogul made toxic by polarizing rhetoric and a pattern of defaults, and a bank with intractable financial problems and a history of misconduct.

The relationship had paid off. Mr. Trump used loans from Deutsche Bank to finance skyscrapers and other high-end properties, and repeatedly cited his relationship with the bank to deflect political attacks on his business acumen. Deutsche Bank used Mr. Trump’s projects to build its investment-banking business, reaped fees from the assets he put in its custody and leveraged his celebrity to lure clients.

Then Mr. Trump won the 2016 election, and the German bank shifted into damage-control mode, bracing for an onslaught of public scrutiny, according to several people involved in the internal response.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "In 2016 & ‘17, I paid thousands of dollars a year in taxes *as a bartender.*

Trump paid $750.

He contributed less to funding our communities than waitresses & undocumented immigrants.

Donald Trump has never cared for our country more than he cares for himself. A walking scam." / Twitter