On 40 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, which Trump also owns outright, he owes another $139 million, due in five years. There’s Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, which Trump owns and which has $100 million of debt on it, due in 2022. But that is only a fraction of the more than $1.1 billion or so in debt and obligations that Trump owes across his empire, my calculations show. The Times reported that “within the next four years,” Trump has “more than $300 million in loans” coming due for which he is personally responsible because he guaranteed them. The Times article, though, raises an even more important question: whether Trump is solvent and might be facing personal bankruptcy. Obviously the devil is in the details, but at least in theory this is not crazy.įrom the Archive: Snakes on Donald Trump’s Campaign Arrow What would make sense, from a tax perspective, is his using the losses incurred from his casinos, golf courses, and hotels to offset his gains from The Apprentice. One of his main sources of profit, apparently, has been from his involvement with The Apprentice, which, the Times reported, made him more than $427 million. What’s clear from both the Times’ reporting and other reporting over the years, including some of my own, is that Trump has two pockets of huge losses: one from driving his casinos into bankruptcy during the 1990s, and one from the poor operation of his golf courses (according to the Times, losses at Doral have come out to $162 million, and his three courses in Scotland and Ireland have lost another $64 million) and his few remaining hotels (the Washington Trump International Hotel has lost $55 million, according to the Times). This is almost certainly what Trump has been doing, my savvy Wall Street sources tell me. Business losses can be carried back to offset profits earned in previous years, generating a tax refund in the process, or they can be used to offset future profits. Yeah, right.īut what of the substance of the Times’ reporting? Leaving aside the moral question of whether the president should pay nothing in federal taxes while everyone else pays their fair share, and then lie about that fact on national television, what about the substance of the idea that a sole proprietor-what Trump was as a businessman-who suffers huge losses by running his businesses poorly-which certainly appears to be the case-can use those losses to shelter gains for tax purposes? That is indeed a long-accepted tax principal. If she didn’t have the goods, the story would not have been printed.) In the ongoing brawl of the evening, Trump also repeated another of his favorite lies: that “soon” enough we’ll see his tax returns for ourselves. (I know it’s a lie because (1) Trump is a proven liar, and (2) I have known Susanne Craig, one of the reporters on the Times story, for years and know her to be a meticulous, exacting, and responsible journalist. Trump’s answer, which was most certainly a lie? That he paid “millions of dollars” in federal taxes in those years. Even so, Chris Wallace, the beleaguered debate moderator, did manage to ask Trump whether it was in fact true that he had paid just $750 in federal income taxes for both 20, as the Times reported. Well, that was certainly one way to knock the devastating New York Times bombshell story of Donald Trump, tax cheat, off front pages and out of television control rooms.
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