When Donald Trump Went to Washington and Got Himself a Tax Break
When Donald Trump Went to Washington and Got Himself a Tax Break
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
6 hrs ago
Speaking in a flurry of words, without notes, Donald J. Trump painted the matter in apocalyptic terms. Unless Congress did as he urged, he said, the United States would face catastrophe. “We are not different right now than the Soviet Union,” Mr. Trump said. “They have no incentive, and we have no incentive.”
It was just before Thanksgiving in 1991, and Mr. Trump was sitting before a special panel in Washington’s Cannon House Office Building. His pitch: for lawmakers to relax tax rules that Mr. Trump said had strangled the real estate industry and left the country mired in depression.
His testimony that day was a rare — if utterly Trumpian — public foray into Washington lobbying for him. And in less than two years, as part of a wide-ranging budget deal under President Bill Clinton, Congress passed a set of provisions that stood to be enormously lucrative to Mr. Trump and the rest of the real estate industry, which lobbied broadly for the changes.
Unless Mr. Trump releases full copies of his tax returns, it will be difficult to know exactly how lucrative. But provisions in the final legislation could have helped him avoid large tax bills linked to the enormous pile of debt he had racked up by the early 1990s, while also allowing him to spin other real estate losses into valuable offsets on his future earnings in licensing, television, and other ventures.
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