September surprise rattles Trump’s race
About 3:30 p.m. Sept. 27, television channels began reporting on the New York Times shocking tax return story excavated from a ton of documents.
Three Times reporters wrote many pages that showed Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years.
Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire assembled the highly complicated tale that proves Trump, over two decades, wrestled with struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.
In addition, hanging over him is 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.
Questioned during a briefing by reporters Sept. 27, he blamed the story on the NYT’s habit of dealing in what he calls “fake news.”
But the newspaper has the documents proving the truth.
His reports to the IRS portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollar a year, yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes.
The Times has obtained tax return data extending over more than two decades for Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office.
It does not include an overview of the Times’ findings; but additional articles will be published in the coming weeks.
In his nearly four years in office — and across his endlessly hyped decades in the public eye — journalists, prosecutors, opposition politicians and conspiracists have, with limited success, sought to excavate the enigmas of his finances.
Researchers are disappointed that they do not reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.
The tax data examined by the Times provides a road map of revelations, from write-offs for the cost of a criminal defense lawyer and a mansion used as a family retreat to a full recounting of the millions of dollars the president received from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.
The Times story said, “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 of his base.”