The New York Times has published ten years of Donald Trump's tax returns up to 2018. The Times reports that:
Together with related financial documents and legal filings, the records offer the most detailed look yet inside the president’s business empire. They reveal the hollowness, but also the wizardry, behind the self-made-billionaire image — honed through his star turn on “The Apprentice” — that helped propel him to the White House and that still undergirds the loyalty of many in his base.
“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.
Trump's claim to fame was that he would bring his business acumen to the United States government. The documents reveal that Trump has no business acumen. They also reveal that, in the year he won the presidency, he paid $750 in taxes. After the first year of his presidency, he paid another $750 in taxes.
Is it any wonder that he has almost destroyed the republic?
8 comments:
I despise Trump, but to be fair, the amount of taxes he paid may be totally legal (but totally immoral.
GDN
I vaguely recall this tax avoidance issue being raised years ago. Trump responded at one of his rallies, telling the crowd that it was proof of his business acumen, his brilliance, that he could transform a bad business deal into a personal windfall for himself. The line was "even on bad deals I come out ahead."
In one year he claimed -- and received -- a $73 million dollar refund, Gordie. You've got to lose a lot of money to get a $73 million refund. That's surely not the hallmark of a brilliant businessman.
It's pretty clear that Donald has always been devoted to coming out ahead, Mound. The problem is that all kinds of other people are victimized in the process. The victims now number in the hundreds of thousands.
Also I'm trained in the Accounting field, Owen, I can't even begin to estimate how many zeroes would be added to the number 1 to guess how much these hundreds of thousands lost in real $$.
Its mind boggling and still, this paragon of me, me, me, has absolutely no conscience.
It was clear four years ago that Trump was a fraud, Lulymay. All those zeroes emphasize just how big a fraud he is.
The scary part is that he's got some $400 million in accrued debts coming due. Being unable to seek a third term Trump could take a second term as an opportunity to use his office to benefit his major creditors on some quid pro quo basis. He seems to have been pretty adept at that in his first 3+ years in power.
Once he's gone he still has to face the New York state and federal prosecutors and multiple investigations to pick up where Mueller fell short. It's said New York plans to go after him for tax fraud for willfully misstating the value of the assets in Fred's estate on his death.
Silly bugger didn't set out to win the presidency. He didn't want the job. He didn't want to be elected and never thought he would. He just wanted to resuscitate his flagging brand.
The Russians bailed him out of Atlantic City, Mound, when no American banks would touch him. It seems pretty clear they're using that leverage.
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