The New York Times obtained President Donald Trump’s tax information for the last two decades revealing his federal income taxes, struggling properties, vast write-offs, decade-long audit battle, and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due soon.
What We Know:
- In the year that Trump won the presidency, he paid $750 in federal income taxes. During his first year at the White House, he paid another $750. In 10 of the previous 15 years, he paid no income taxes at all, largely due to the fact that he reported losing more than he made.
- As Trump’s re-election campaign wages on, he is under significant financial pressure, threatened by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. It was also revealed that Trump is undergoing a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.
- The tax return information that The New York Times obtained spans back two decades and includes information on the hundreds of businesses that make up his business organization as well as detailed information from his first two years in office, but it does not include his personal returns fro 2018 or 2019.
- In response to The Times’ findings, a lawyer for the Trump organization, Alan Garten, said that “most, if not all, of the facts, appears to be inaccurate” and requested access to the documents that the findings were based. The Times declined in order to protect their source, but Garten continued to take issue with the amount of federal income taxes Trump paid.
- “Over the past decade, President Trump has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government, including paying millions in personal taxes since announcing his candidacy in 2015,” Garten said in a statement. The Times reported by saying “personal taxes,” Garten was conflating income taxes with other federal taxes Trump has paid like Social Security, Medicare, and taxes for his household employees.
- The tax data that The Times obtained and examined provides a broad scope of details and revelations about President Trump, from write-offs for the cost of a criminal defense lawyer and a mansion used as a family retreat to a full accounting of the millions of dollars Trump received from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow when he was co-owner. These new records, along with related financial documents and legal filings, offer an extremely detailed look into the president’s business empire.
- Since Trump’s tax returns were originally sought, Trump has often questioned why anyone would want to see them, telling the Associated Press in 2016, “There’s nothing to learn from them.” He said we should instead look at the annual financial disclosures required of him as president, but those public filings allow for a distorted view as they simply report revenue, not profit. In 2018, in the disclosure, Trump announced that he made at least $434.9 million, but the tax records reveal it was actually $47.4 million in losses.
- Most of Trump’s core enterprises like his array of golf courses to his Washington hotel, reported losing millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars year after year. His revenue from “The Apprentice” and from licensing deals are dwindling, and several years ago he sold nearly all the stocks. The IRS tax audit still looms and within the next four years, more than $300 million in loans, obligations for which he is personally responsible, will come due.
- Trump’s refusal to separate himself from his business operations has long been under fire with many questioning how those business operations could be kept separate from presidential duties and obligations. The tax records now reveal the ways, and dollar amounts, his businesses “have become bazaars for collecting money directly from lobbyists, foreign officials and others seeking face time, access or favor.”
- In 2015, The Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida gained a flood of new members which allowed him to pocket an additional $5 million a year from the business.
- In 2017, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association paid at least $397,602 to the Washington hotel, where the group held at least one event during its four-day World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians.
- While Trump said he wouldn’t pursue any new international deals while he has in office, his international business ventures stayed intact. In his first two years in office, his revenue from abroad totaled $73 million. Much of that money was from his golf properties in Scotland and Ireland, but some came from licensing deals in countries with authoritarian-leaning leaders or others with thorny geopolitics, for example, $3 million from the Philippines, $2.3 million from India, and $1 million from Turkey.
- Trump also paid taxes in these overseas ventures. For the United States, he paid $750 in federal income taxes which goes towards US government operations, but he or his companies paid $15,598 in Panama, $145,400 in India, and $156,824 in the Philippines.
- The Times examined and analyzed the data from thousands of individual and business tax returns for 2000 through 2017, along with additional tax information from other years. All of the information The Times obtained was provided by sources with legal access to it and The Times was able to verify portions of it by comparing it with publicly available information and confidential records.
- Trump’s avoidance of paying federal income taxes is one of the most striking revelations in his tax returns as the effective tax rate paid by the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans should have caused him to pay more than $100 million. His net income from his fame totaled $427.4 million through 2018 and a further $176.5 million in profit came to him through his investment in two highly successful office buildings in New York. The collective and persistent losses he reported from business Trump-owned and ran himself largely absolved him from paying federal income taxes on the $600 million from “The Apprentice,” branding deals and investments.
- According to confidential records, starting in 2010 Trump claimed and received, an income tax refund totaling $72.9 million, all the federal income tax he had paid for 2005 through 2008, plus interest. The legitimacy of that refund is at the center of the decade long audit battle that he has long been waging with the IRS.
- Some reductions in Trump’s ss tax liability are categorized as unexplained consulting fees. The Times cites evidence that some of the fees may have been paid to his daughter, Ivanka Trump, though she was not an outside figure as she is a top official in the Trump Organization. If that were true, it could create further legal problems.
- In the tax records, Trump has written off many expenses over the past two decades, calling them business expenses costs. This includes fuel and meals associated with his aircraft which is used to shuttle him among his various homes and properties as well as the cost of haircuts, including the more than $70,000 paid to style his hair during “The Apprentice.” Additionally, in total nine Trump entities have written off at least $95,464 paid to a favorite hair and makeup artist of Ivanka Trump. Trump’s most generous interpretation of the business expense write-off is his treatment of the Seven Springs estate in Westchester County, NY, calling it a “Trump Family Retreat.”
- The Trump Organization is currently under investigation by the New York Attorney General for improperly inflating the values on some of its properties in order to obtain loans and get economic and tax benefits related to those properties. The value of 40 Wall St. in Manhattan, Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles, and Trump International Hotel and Tower Chicago are all under investigation. Eric Trump is to be deposed in the case no later than October 7.
- At a White House briefing on Sunday after the New York Times story was released, Trump denied the story, calling it “totally fake news” and claimed that he pays “a lot” in federal income taxes. “I pay a lot, and I pay a lot in state income taxes,” he said.
- Tony Schwartz, the co-author of the business advice book The Art of The Deal, said Trump has committed one of the greatest tax frauds in IRS history. “He is running a criminal enterprise. This, no matter what the effect is on any given voters, is big, big news,” the author also told Anderson Cooper on the presenter’s CNN show.
Re Trump’s massive fraudulent tax cheating: this is who he is and has always been: a lying, cheating felon. Lock him up.
— Tony Schwartz (@tonyschwartz) September 27, 2020
You can read the full detailed account of Trump’s tax returns and the New York Times exposé here.
