Are you among the millions of Americans who’s been curious about Donald Trump’s taxes? Well, wonder no more — but, prepare to be shocked and amazed.
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Folks, we now know the reason Donald Trump has fought tooth and nail to prevent anyone from ever seeing or knowing about his taxes. It’s because HE DOESN’T PAY ANY!
According to a stunning expose’ from The New York Times on Sunday, Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and then another $750 during his first year in the White House. However, he paid ZERO income tax over 10 of the previous 15 years. Why, you ask? Predominately because Trump lost more money than he made and was able to successfully skirt the system.
Yes, Trump’s taxes are a deeply guarded national secret because they are an embarrassment — or at least nowhere near the billions ‘The Donald’ has bragged for years that he’s worth.
Exhaustive investigative journalism from The Times has uncovered that Trump may not want to be president. He NEEDS to remain president in order to avoid paying hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he personally guaranteed. For example, Trump is currently engaged in 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. This means that Trump could owe the IRS more than $100 million in taxes and fees once he’s no longer protected by the cloak of the presidency.
“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 reported. “His reports to the IRS 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. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.”
Reading between the lines, it appears Trump has used the presidency to prop up his personal finances, shield himself from legal liability for the millions he owes in back taxes and fees, and to curry favor with businesses and foreign governments to help keep him afloat and out of debtors prison.
The New York Times also discovered a shrewd tax scam involving Trump’s taxes and Trump’s daughter, Ivanka. The “double-dipping” scheme involved Trump reducing his taxable income to the IRS by treating a family member (Ivanka) as a consultant, then deducting her fee as a cost of doing business.
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“The ‘consultants’ are not identified in the tax records. But evidence of this arrangement was gleaned by comparing the confidential tax records to the financial disclosures Ivanka Trump filed when she joined the White House staff in 2017,” The Times published. “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. Ms. Trump had been an executive officer of the Trump companies that received profits from and paid the consulting fees for both projects — meaning she appears to have been treated as a consultant on the same hotel deals that she helped manage as part of her job at her father’s business.”
Or, in other words, it was all a tax sham.
Fake consulting deals such as this are an enormous red flag to the IRS. Apparently, Ivanka and Donald Trump were each cheating the United States government and the American people in order to hide income and avoid paying taxes. Now, they both could go down for their involvement.
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“The New York Times’ report on the President’s tax returns reveals a pitifully inept businessman and a serial tax avoider crushed by massive debts.” – CNN
In more news, Trump’s work on and partial ownership of the television show “The Apprentice,” along with several licensing and endorsement deals that emerged from his expanding celebrity, brought him a total of $427.4 million. However, he quickly squandered almost all of that away via a collection of businesses and golf courses that devoured cash and lost millions, if not tens of millions of dollars year after year.
For example, Donald Trump announced in his 2018 disclosure that he made an income of at least $434.9 million. However, tax records revealed a much different representation of his financial bottom line: $47.4 million in losses.
“Ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful in playing a business mogul than being one in real life,” The Times said.
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“I play to people’s fantasies. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.” – Donald Trump, from “Trump: The Art of the Deal.”
Donald Trump once promised to release his tax returns if President Barack Obama released his birth certificate. When he ran for president in 2016, he vowed to make his taxes public if Hillary Clinton were to make public the deleted emails from her private server. He even boasted that his tax returns were “very big” and “beautiful.” However, time after time, he has always found some excuse to keep them private.
“It’s very complicated,” Trump said. “I can’t release my taxes while under audit,” he also claimed — an argument refuted by his own IRS commissioner. When prosecutors and congressional investigators issued subpoenas to see Trump’s taxes, he invoked his private lawyers and even the power of the US Justice Department to stalemate those attempts all the way to the Supreme Court.
Could it be that Trump’s taxes hide a financial clue to his deference to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin? Has Trump written off the various hush-money payments to porn stars as a business expense? Is some domestic or foreign source secretly paying Trump’s bills in exchange for presidential favor?
Although Donald Trump told voters back in 2015 that he was uniquely qualified to be president because he was “really rich” and had “built a great company,” the truth is that Trump is a flim-flam man who is so broke and so deeply in debt, he’d have nothing if not for the income gained from retail and commercial spaces at Trump Tower.
With the first of 3 presidential debates set to begin on Tuesday, it’s not a stretch to launch a countdown to Trump calling this news story (just like every other piece of unflattering journalism he doesn’t like) “FAKE NEWS.” In 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…
Thanks for this DJ. I usually don’t watch more than maybe 5 hrs of CNN and MSNBC combined on a weekly basis. However, about 2 months ago I completely stopped watching both networks. But I do check out any actual “breaking news” (meaning…new information) from time to time on CNN’s website. The truth is, these days I get most of my American news from you my friend. So thanks again for this new update and the details. Of course, None of it surprises me in the least. In fact, we’ve been saying it right here for quite some time that Trump isn’t worth nearly as much money as he keeps claiming to be. And we knew he was hiding all kinds of sh*t in his tax returns that he never wanted to be made public. So again, no surprise. By now even die-hard “Trumplicans” (my name for them) know he’s… Read more »