Ohio’s ‘mom brigade’ takes aim at Trump

Vast bulk of deductions president claimed came from not developing land

CLEVELAND, OHIO—How to break the news to a staunch Republican family that, for the first time in your life, you’ll be voting for a Democratic president? You don’t. Not when you’ve got six kids and rely on the grandparents for child care clustering, especially amidst a pandemic.

Keeping familial relations smooth means Thera Parks will be keeping her ballot details undercover. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Just let everyone assume.

“I’ve been a Republican my entire life,” says the 48-year-old self-described suburban mom, who also has a fulltime job in medical sales. “My parents are huge Trumpists. But I feel like my

y is headed toward a dictatorship of Donald Trump and his family if he wins a second term. What I don’t understand is how anybody can vote for him after what he’s put the country through.

“My gosh, he’s such a bully and such a racist. The lack of morals, the lack of values. If my youngest kid — he’s nine — pended from school.”

Parks lives just outside Cleveland, part of a demographic — white women in the suburbs — who helped deliver Ohio o Trump in 2016 by a stout, if not quite a rout, eight percentage points.

In U.S. President Donald Trump’s telling, he is a committed philanthropist with strong ties to many charities. “If you don’t give back, you’re never ever going to be fulfilled in life,” he wrote in “Trump 101: The Way to Success,” published at the height of his “Apprentice” fame.

And according to his tax records, he has given back at least $130 million (U.S.) since 2005, his second year as a reality TV star.

But the long-hidden tax records, obtained by the New York Times, show that Trump did not have to reach into his wallet for most of that giving. The vast bulk of his charitable tax deductions, $119.3 million worth, came from simply agreeing not to develop land — in several cases, after he had shelved development plans.

Three of the agreements involved what are known as conservation easements — a manoeuvre, popular among wealthy Americans, that typically allows a landowner to keep a property’s title and receive a tax deduction equal to its appraised value. In the fourth land deal, Trump donated property for a state park.

The New York attorney general is investigating whether the appraisals on two of Trump’s easement donations were improperly inflated to win larger tax breaks, according to court filings.

Trump’s pronouncements of philanthropic largesse have been broadly discredited by reporting, most notably in the Washington Post, that found he had exaggerated, or simply never made, an array of claimed contributions.

But the tax data examined by the Times lends new authority and far greater precision to those findings. The records, encompassing his reported philanthropic activity through 2017, reveal not only its exact dimensions; they show that much of his charity has come when he was under duress — facing damage to his reputation or big tax bills in years of high income.

Of the $7.5 million in business and personal cash contributions reported to the IRS since 2005, more than 40 per cent — $3.2 million — came starting in 2015, when Trump’s philanthropy fell under scrutiny after he announced his White House bid. In 2017, his first year in office, he declared $1.9 million in cash gifts. In 2014, by contrast, he contributed $81,499.