Trump’s losses, debt and tiny taxes
The impression that President Trump is a man with much to hide has never been stronger than on the subject of his income taxes. Not only was he the first majorparty nominee since Watergate to refuse to disclose his tax returns; he also fought fiercely to prevent legislative and law enforcement investigators from obtaining the records, even suing his own accountant to keep them under wraps and pursuing the matter all the way to the Supreme Court.
Now we know why. Tax returns reviewed by the New York Times show that if Trump is not a criminal, he could be branded with an epithet he appears to consider far worse: loser.
In the year he ran for the nation’s highest office and the year he assumed it, according to the Times, Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes. That’s less than a hundredth of what his predecessor, Barack Obama, paid in 2015 and less than a third of what the average middleclass household paid on about $60,000 in income in 2016. But it was more than Trump coughed up across over a decade’s worth of tax years since 2000 — namely, nothing.
How did Trump, the selfconscious caricature of a rich man, come to owe the government he leads so little? By claiming huge losses on the businesses he runs, from casinos to hotels to golf courses. If the losses aren’t real, as Trump has sometimes suggested, claiming them would be against the law. If they are, the president has hemorrhaged money on a daunting scale, undermining the claims to business success that helped him become the first president with no military or elective experience.
Trump lost more than $160 million in six years on his largest golf course, the Miamiarea Trump National Doral, the documents show, and more than $300 million on his entire golf empire since 2000. He has already lost more than $55 million on one of his most recent acquisitions, the Trump International Hotel opened near the White House the year he ran for president. It’s no wonder, then, that he attempted to stage the G7 summit at the Doral and welcomed dubious federal and foreign tribute at the latter.
Those and other presidential properties have seen receipts rise since Trump took office, and the returns reportedly provide other reasons to believe he is using the presidency to prop up failing businesses. Russia, Turkey and the Philippines, all run by strongmen he has flattered, have been significant income sources in the past. And Trump certainly has a motive to enrich himself by any available means, with hundreds of millions of dollars of personal debts coming due and a $72.9 million tax refund being challenged by the IRS.
The tax records also underscore Trump’s willingness to cross ethical and legal boundaries to maximize his and his family’s gains. They show his companies paid his daughter Ivanka nearly $750,000 to act as a consultant on two hotel projects even though she was also billed as a Trump executive. That was a small fraction of the $26 million in mysterious consulting fees claimed as deductible business expenses to reduce income tax liabilities and possibly enrich Trump’s relatives without incurring gift taxes.
The revelations are instructive ahead of Trump’s first debate with Democratic nominee Joe Biden, whom he has accused of orchestrating the unethical enrichment of his son Hunter with no such evidence. They also illustrate the need to rein in future presidents with more than mere custom, from legally requiring them to release financial information to enforcing the Constitution’s largely unused prohibitions against selfdealing. If Congress and the courts take no such lessons from Trump’s corrupt presidency, the American people will be the losers.