The New York Times has ripped away the curtain, revealing the Great and Powerful Trump to be a shameless fraud.
In a masterpiece of journalism, Times reporters obtained and analyzed tax-return data for Donald Trump and his sprawling business organization, going back more than two decades.
Among other things, the supposed billionaire avoided paying any federal income taxes for many years, and paid only paltry sums in others, including just $750 the year he was elected.
They confirm what many have suspected for years: Trump is no “art of the deal” business genius, but an inept, boastful pretender, now caught up in a tax tangle of his own making. And he could end up in prison for it.
Trump already faces a federal audit, and the Manhattan District Attorney confirmed a week ago that Trump could wind up charged with tax fraud at the state level.
“But what makes the renewed focus on the legality Trump’s tax returns so perilous for him is that, should they be found to be fraudulent or evasive by investigators, they could put Trump and his associates in serious legal jeopardy, including potential prison time,” Forbes reports.
“The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public,” the Times says. “His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes.”
In 2016 and 2017, the two years straddling his election victory, the newspaper reports, Trump paid just $750 dollars each year in federal income taxes — a fraction of what most hard-working Americans pay. And in 10 of the 15 years before that, he paid no income taxes at all, “largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.”
“This is a con man in the White House,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told CNN, which noted that four years ago, Trump “shattered convention by refusing to release his tax records to the public while running for office.”
Of course, Trump responded to the Sunday evening Times report by calling it “totally fake news.” But he still wouldn’t discuss his taxes.
“Within hours of the report’s publication, the Biden campaign had already put vinyl stickers up for sale on its website — reading, ‘I paid more income taxes than Donald Trump,’” CNN says.
This leaves Trump in a potentially disastrous situation, just one day before he takes on Joe Biden in the first presidential debate and with just weeks left to play catch-up in an election campaign where he is trailing.
If Trump loses his re-election bid he’ll be left without the legal protection the presidency affords him — and facing a literal payback moment: he has more than $300 million in loans coming due over the next four years.
“Due to his indebtedness, his reliance on income from overseas and his refusal to authentically distance himself from his hodgepodge of business, Trump represents a profound national security threat – a threat that will only escalate if he’s re-elected,” writes Bloomberg’s Timothy O’Brien, the author of “TrumpNation,” a critical biography.
“Trump has been bloviating about being worth $10 billion ever since he entered the 2016 presidential race, a figure that simply isn’t true. He’s worth a fraction of that amount, and the larger his indebtedness becomes, the more strain it puts on his assets,” O’Brien writes.
The Times notes “a curious pattern” in the Trump Organization’s tax records: the president wrote off about $26 million in unexplained “consulting fees” as a business expense between 2010 and 2018; those fees accounted for “roughly one-fifth of his income,” the newspaper says.
Those “consultants” are not identified — but at least one of them appears to be his daughter Ivanka.
“Ms. Trump reported receiving payments from a consulting company she co-owned, totaling $747,622, that exactly matched consulting fees claimed as tax deductions by the Trump Organization for hotel projects in Vancouver and Hawaii,” the Times says.
