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Celerity

(43,585 posts) Mon Sep 28, 2020, 07:45 PM Sep 2020

He's Broke

The bombshell New York Times story reveals everything we need to know about Donald Trump's taxes, and why he is completely unfit for office.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/hes-broke

Contrary to Donald Trump claims that he is a successful billionaire, he is in fact a broke, potentially tax cheating fraud. “Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.” That was the New York Times yesterday in a bombshell report that finally revealed details on Trump’s tax returns from the past two decades. Trump paid almost nothing “largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.” According to the Times, Trump is also involved 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. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.” The Times report doesn’t just blow away the myth that Trump is a successful business mogul, it paints a picture of a desperate man engaged in extraordinary financial skulduggery in order to maintain his luxurious lifestyle and cover up his failings.

Most of Trump’s key businesses are losing money and he owes hundreds of millions of dollars in loans that he personally guaranteed. The report reveals for example that he paid Ivanka Trump, who was a full time employee of his company, $747,622 in consulting fees on hotel deals, and then wrote off the consulting fees as a business expense. Trump has written off “some $26 million” in consulting fees since 2010, millions of dollars in property taxes by claiming his properties are for investment purposes only, and has only made money from the Trump Tower in New York, his work on ‘The Apprentice’, and licensing out his name. Notably, the Times notes that, “the reported losses from the operating businesses were so large that they often fully erased the licensing income, leaving the organization to claim that it earns no money and thus owes no taxes.” It has not been proven in court (yet) that Trump is a tax cheat, but the evidence does not look good. More importantly though, Trump’s tax returns reveal he has cheated the American public by pretending to be a successful billionaire. He didn’t want to release his tax records for a reason: they reveal the true state of his financial affairs, and they are a complete mess. Trump of course dismissed the Times report as “totally fake news”.

“We went through the same stories, you could have asked me the same questions four years ago, I had to litigate this and talk about it,” he said at a press conference. “Totally fake news, no. Actually I paid tax. And you’ll see that as soon as my tax returns – it’s under audit, they’ve been under audit for a long time. The [Internal Revenue Service] does not treat me well … they treat me very badly. You have people in the IRS – they treat me very badly.” Trump could clear this up quickly if he did reveal his tax returns (he can, because the IRS does not forbid anyone under audit from releasing them), but of course he won’t because he knows the story is true — or perhaps even worse than the findings Times report has revealed. If Trump really is the billionaire he claims to be, then he has clearly defrauded the federal government of hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue. No real billionaire pays almost no federal taxes for close to two decades. The most likely scenario is spelled out in clear detail by the Times report: Trump is broke, and he has engaged in various forms of tax fraud.

Will this make a difference in the election? It is impossible to predict much in the volatile era of Donald Trump, but the story is truly extraordinary and there’s a strong chance it could help shift the needle further to Biden. The more the Emperor is revealed to have no clothes, the harder it is for Trump to win over voters in key demographics needed to beat Biden. Trump is losing with women, independents, and college educated whites — voters he desperately needs to court if he wants to catch up to Biden. The closer it gets to the election, the more attention these voters will be paying to stories like this, making the timing of the story extremely bad for the president. The revelation also gives Joe Biden a chance to hammer Trump over the issue in the presidential debate tomorrow alongside a huge list of his catastrophic failures while in office. Biden already has vast amounts of ammunition to create a powerful narrative about Trump’s unfitness to serve as president, and this will help solidify in many voters minds the notion that he is an active threat to democracy. Biden must remind viewers that Trump’s history of failure spans through all aspects of his life, and that the tax returns complete a deeply troubling psychological profile of a man who destroys literally everything he touches.

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