Tax Returns Reveal Trump’s Image Is A Sham

Trump’s taxes have been largely a mystery since he first ran for office. He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years. Largely because he reported losing much more money than he made. As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing. His finances are under stress. Beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also 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.

The New York Times said it will not make Trump’s tax-return data public so as not to jeopardize its sources. “Who have taken enormous personal risks to help inform the public.”The tax-return data obtained by the newspaper does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019. Trump refused to talk about his tax returns and blasted the Times report as “totally fake news” on Sunday. But the article portrays the anti-elite crusader who rails against a corrupt system as actually using its loopholes to avoid paying any federal taxes at all in 10 of 15 years beginning in 2000 by writing off his own staggering losses.

Here are some of the figures

$750 Federal tax Trump paid in 2016, when he won the presidency.

$750 Federal tax Trump paid the following year.

Zero Federal tax paid by Trump in 10 of the previous 15 years, including 2014 and 2015.

$100,000 a year By comparison, the kind of figure regularly paid in federal taxes by Trump’s predecessors, Barack Obama and George W Bush

$70,000 Paid to style Trump’s hair for television, claimed as expenses.

$95,464 The total sum nine of Trump’s companies have paid as expenses to style Ivanka Trump’s hair.

$210,000 The amount written off as expenses to hire a photographer taking photographs at the Mar-a-Lago club.

$26 m “Consulting fees” charged as a business expense between 2010 and 2018, at least some of which appears to have been directed to a company co-owned by Ivanka Trump.

$434 m What Trump declared his earnings to be in the 2018 presidential public annual financial disclosure.

$47.4 m in losses What he had declared to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for tax purposes over the same period.

$421 m Outstanding loans that Trump owes, most of which becomes due within the next four years.

$ 73 m Revenue generated from outside the US, presenting a potential conflict of interest with US foreign policy.

$13 m Earned in one licensing deal for Trump Towers in Istanbul, including $1 m since he became president.

$72.9 m The tax refund Trump claimed and was awarded, which is now the subject of a decade-long audit battle with the IRS. It covered all the federal tax he had paid between 2005 and 2008.

$1.4 m The annual average amount of federal tax paid by Trump between 2000 and 2017. It compares with the $25 m in federal income taxes the average American with similar declared earnings could expect to pay.

$100 m The amount Trump could now have to pay back to the IRS, including penalties, if it finds against him in the audit.

$315 m The sum reported “lost” by Trump’s golf courses since 2000.

As the legal and political battles over access to his tax returns have intensified, Mr. Trump has often wondered aloud why anyone would even want to see them. “There’s nothing to learn from them,” he told The Associated Press in 2016. There is far more useful information, he has said, in the annual financial disclosures required of him as president — which he has pointed to as evidence of his mastery of a flourishing, and immensely profitable, business universe.