Trump would rather people see him as a tax cheat than as a loser. He's both, of course. If you think his base of drooling morons and racists cares, you haven't been paying any attention at all. They don't. He's their hero. When he said he could shoot someone in the face on 5th Avenue and not lose a supporter, he was 100% correct. But the NY Times isn't publishing for the drooling morons and racists who back Trump, are they? The 5 biggest takeaways from the investigation into his 1985-1994 taxes:
• Trump was deep in the red even as he peddled deal-making adviceTrump: The Art of the Deal came out in 1987. It became a best seller-- and a powerful vehicle for the self-spun myth of the self-made billionaire that would ultimately help propel him to the presidency.Mr. Trump has long attributed his first run of business reversals and bankruptcies to the recession that hit three years later, in 1990. But the new tax information reveals that he was already in deep financial distress when his master-of-the-universe memoir hit the shelves.For Mr. Trump, the 1980s were a frenzy of acquisition and construction, buoyed by hundreds of millions of dollars of borrowed money. In 1985, for the first time, Forbes’s “rich list” included Mr. Trump individually, independent of his father. But his estimated net worth according to the magazine, $600 million, included the real estate empire Fred Trump still owned.With Mr. Trump’s vast debt and other expenses on his properties-- among them Trump Tower and the Grand Hyatt hotel in Manhattan, and two Atlantic City casinos-- his fortunes were already on the way down. In 1985, his core businesses reported a loss of $46.1 million; they also carried over a $5.6 million loss for earlier years.Because those businesses were generally created as partnerships, they did not pay federal income taxes themselves. Instead, their gains, and their losses, flowed onto Mr. Trump’s ledger. To put his results in perspective, The Times compared them with detailed information that the I.R.S. compiles on an annual one-third sampling of high earners. Most of them appeared, like Mr. Trump, to be businessmen who received what is known as pass-through income.For 1985, the I.R.S. information indicates this: Only three individual taxpayers in the sampling reported bigger losses than Mr. Trump.• In multiple years, he appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual taxpayerThe tax results for the years that followed trace an arc of continued empire building-- and gathering loss.He bought the Eastern Airlines shuttle for $365 million; it never made a profit, and he spent more than $7 million a month to keep it flying. His new Trump Taj Mahal Hotel and Casino, opened in 1990 with more than $800 million in debt, sucked revenue from his other casinos, pulling them along into the red.And so, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual taxpayer, according to the I.R.S. information on high earners-- a publicly available database with taxpayers’ identifying details removed. Indeed, in 1990 and 1991, his core businesses lost more than $250 million each year-- more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the sampling for those years.The tax code allows owners of commercial property to write down the cost of their buildings-- a valuable tax shelter known as depreciation. In The Art of the Deal, Mr. Trump cited one of his Atlantic City casinos to show how it works. Built for $400 million and depreciated at a rate of 4 percent a year, he said, it could allow him to shelter $16 million in taxable income annually. But Mr. Trump’s example, meant to demonstrate the magic of depreciation, shows something else: Depreciation alone cannot account for the hundreds of millions of dollars in losses he declared on his taxes.• He paid no federal income taxes for eight of the 10 yearsBusiness owners like Mr. Trump may also use their losses to avoid paying taxes on future income. Over the years, those losses rolled into a $915.7 million free pass, known as a net operating loss, that appeared on his 1995 tax returns, pages of which were mailed anonymously to The Times during the 2016 campaign.The new tax information shows how Mr. Trump’s net operating losses snowballed, reaching $418 million in 1991. That was fully 1 percent of all the losses that the I.R.S. reported had been declared by individual taxpayers that year.And the red ink continued to accumulate apace. In all, Mr. Trump lost so much money that he was able to avoid paying any federal income taxes for eight of the 10 years.• He made millions posing as a corporate raider-- until investors realized he never followed throughFor a time, Mr. Trump was able to stave off his coming collapse with the help of a new public role: He traded on his business-titan brand to present himself as a corporate raider. He would acquire shares in a company with borrowed money, suggest publicly that he was contemplating a takeover, then quietly sell on the resulting bump in the stock price. An occasional quote from a high-profile associate helped burnish the myth.“He has an appetite like a Rocky Mountain vulture,” his stockbroker, Alan C. Greenberg, told the Wall Street Journal in 1987. “He’d like to own the world.”From 1986 through 1989, Mr. Trump declared $67.3 million in gains from stocks and other assets bought and sold within a year.But ultimately, the figures show, he lost most, if not all, of those gains after investors stopped taking his takeover talk seriously.• His interest income spiked in 1989 at $52.9 million, but the source is a mysteryAmid the hundreds of figures on 10 years of tax transcripts, one number is particularly striking: $52.9 million in interest income that Mr. Trump reported in 1989.In the three previous years, Mr. Trump had reported $460,566, then $5.5 million, then $11.8 million in interest.The source of that outlier $52.9 million is something of a mystery.Taxpayers can receive interest income from a variety of sources, including bonds, bank accounts and mortgages. Hard data on the workings of Mr. Trump’s businesses is hard to come by. But public findings from New Jersey casino regulators show no evidence that he owned anything capable of generating that much interest. Nor is there any such evidence in a 1990 report on his financial condition, prepared by accountants he hired at his bankers’ request.Mr. Trump’s interest income fell almost as quickly as it rose. By 1992, he was reporting only $3.6 million.
As Chris Cillizza noted for CNN yesterday, it's an emperor has no clothes moment for Señor Trumpanzee. The pig's "entire persona is built on a singular idea: He's the brash, break-all-the-rules billionaire. Like him or hate him, you can't help but admire his massive wealth and the smarts that allowed him to accrue it." What a laugh! And Cillizza points to the Times/ report to prove it: "The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses-- largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade. In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. His core business losses in 1990 and 1991-- more than $250 million each year-- were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years."
More than $1 billion in losses in a single decade!More than double the losses of the nearest other taxpayer in 1990 and 1991!The single biggest loser (of money) of all American taxpayers in the period 1985-1994!What the Times story does is something simple but profound: It punctures the balloon-- puffed up by years of Trumpian marketing and salesmanship-- that the President of the United States was some sort of business genius. In fact, Trump was one of-- if not the-- biggest failures (in terms of money making and losing) in the country during a decade-long stretch. His ability to maintain his wealth and, eventually, to grow it was born of taking advantage of a system of tax laws and loopholes friendly to big business....Trump explicitly ran for president on the idea that his business acumen gave him a unique-- and more valuable-- perspective on how to run the country than anyone else who had ever held the office (and certainly the other Republicans and Democrats running for the White House in 2016.)...The logic is simple: I am rich. I made all of this money for myself over all these years but now I want to make the country-- and you, individual voter!-- rich too. Trump was pitching a secularized version of the Joel Osteen aspirational gospel; I can teach you to think and act like me, and, in so doing, you can be just like me!A huge part of Trump's appeal was encased in the idea that he was the American dream: A super-wealthy guy with a beautiful wife, lots of homes and his own plane with his name on the side. His years as a reality TV star served to codify that idea in peoples' minds; Trump was always getting off a helicopter or riding in a limousine-- in the middle of some major deal that would make him millions.Thanks to the New York Times, we know now all of that was pure American myth-making. Trump wasn't-- as he tried to portray himself-- a self-made man at all.His wealth was hugely derived from his father. (Trump famously/infamously said his father, Fred, gave him only a "small" $1 million loan as he began his career as a real estate developer.) And now we know that during a critical period of his business life, Trump was losing more than $1 billion in a 10-year span-- a total that made him one of the single largest losers of money in America at the time.Put plainly: The story that Donald Trump has been telling himself and the American public for much of his life-- and especially since becoming a presidential candidate in 2015-- isn't true. And it's more than an exaggeration. It's the opposite of what happened. Trump was gifted huge amounts of money by his father. He lost it at eye-popping rates.Will any of this matter to Trump's supporters or, more broadly, to the 2020 electorate? Probably not. Minds have been made up-- on both sides-- about Trump for a very long time. Facts and reality don't seem to puncture those opinions about the President.But whether voters vote on this issue next November is, really, beside the point. And the point is this: Donald Trump is not the person he sold himself to be to the American public in 2016. Period.
Tuesday I took an odd call-- and stayed on the phone for two hours with someone I didn't know. He recently wrote the autobiography of another brash New Yorker who happens to be a Trump doppelgänger. Writing the book-- he wrote every single word, just the way Tony Schwartz wrote every single word of The Art of the Deal-- he came to loathe the monster he was helping to mythologize, just as Schwartz had. He told me there wasn't a single word of truth in the book, that it was just one self-serving lie after the other. He described his subject to me as the very definition of a malignant narcissistic sociopath, which is also the way mental health experts describe Trumpanzee.Malignant narcissism is "a psychological syndrome comprising an extreme mix of narcissism, antisocial behavior, aggression, and sadism. Grandiose, and always ready to raise hostility levels, the malignant narcissist undermines families and organizations in which they are involved, and dehumanizes the people with whom they associate." Sound like anyone you know?By understanding the characteristics of a high functioning sociopath, you can see how this individual may be manipulating and exploiting you. They are usually very charming and clever and, at first, their actions may seem genuine. Over time, their lies, deceptions, and lack of empathy are exposed to reveal their sociopathic nature. These characteristics traits include:
• High IQ: High functioning sociopaths often have a higher IQ than other sociopaths or people without personality disorders. This helps them plan, manipulate, and exploit others.• Lack of empathy: Difficulty in empathizing with others or understanding the emotional consequences of their actions.• Narcissism: They often have strong self-love and grandiose self-image. This occurs because of low esteem and delusional beliefs.• Charming: Although most sociopaths lack empathy, they are capable of mimicking and manipulating emotions to appear charming and normal.• Secretive: A sociopath doesn't feel the need to share intimate details with others unless it is to manipulate.• Sexually deviant: Since they lack guilt, remorse, and emotional attachments, sociopaths tend to have affairs and engage in the questionable sexual activity.• Sensitive to criticism: Despite their lack of empathy, sociopaths desire the approval of others. They feel entitled to admiration and are quick to anger when criticized.• Impulsive behavior: Sociopaths often live in the moment and will do what they feel is needed to reach their immediate goals.• Compulsive lying: Disregarding the truth to make themselves look better or get what they want.• Needing constant stimulation: Sociopaths often get bored easily and need to be actively engaged.• Addictive Behavior: Their compulsive mindset may result in addiction to drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, or other addictive behaviors.• Criminal Behavior: Criminal activity associated with sociopaths could include theft, assault, or destruction of property.
Time for a new president? I have a good idea on that... if you're so disposed.Or do you want 4 more years? If you want for more years of Trump, just help make Status Quo Joe the Democratic nominee. He's exactly what voters don't want. This morning an old friend wrote me a long letter about Biden. She thinks he would be a much worse disaster for Democrats than Hillary was. "As bad as we think Hillary was, Biden would be a MUCH MUCH WORSE candidate than she was. She is gigantically smarter than him, for one, and she would have been much better than him policy wise in several areas-- women’s health issues for sure and racial and social issues, and maybe even protecting the environment. I don’t think she would have compromised about Social Security and Medicare whereas Biden would in a heartbeat (and has historically). She would have been much stronger about health care coverage, too, although perhaps not behind medicare for all-- after all she did try in the 1990’s-- but Biden would be totally awful. Oh, and I have said-- I heard him speak-- she is eloquent and he is a bumbling jerk. He is a lousy speaker and Trump will bully him and make him look stupid quickly and easily, whereas Hillary stood up to Trump and did well in the debates. Biden would fare very poorly-- he is not swift on his feet. As you said, he is not smart by a long shot, he is an idiot."Good. The second part of her letter is disturbing though, for several reasons: "My friend’s husband, a progressive with whom I talk politics occasionally," she wrote "is now behind Biden all the way. When I entered their house recently he yelled, "This is Biden country." I offered to send him stuff about Biden but he was not interested and said he wouldn’t read it. I am very disappointed in him and have revised my opinion of him-- he is an idiot. Literally and clearly, he is not a smart guy. He keeps up with politics but still, he is not bright. I think he is a rigid thinker and he is feeling relief that he can get behind someone he thinks could beat Trump-- totally wrong, of course. Biden would lose to Trump, unquestionably. His horrible history and poor speaking ability would and should ruin him as a candidate."Both Biden and Bernie are very much today like they were in the 1970s. Biden is grudgingly apologizing for everything he ever did. Bernie embraces his earliest policies.
