The New York Times has obtained President Donald Trump’s long-concealed tax information extending over more than two decades, showing that he did not pay any federal income taxes at all in 10 of 15 years before he won the presidential election in 2016.
The bombshell records obtained by The Times reveal that Donald J. Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency, and another $750 on his first year in the White House in 2017.
Trump paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years before his presidential election win largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.
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The information contained in the tax records paints a story of struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.
The tax-return data extend over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office. It does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019, The Times said.
The New York Times wrote: “As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is 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 added: “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. His reports to the I.R.S. 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.
“The returns are some of the most sought-after, and speculated-about, records in recent memory. In Mr. Trump’s nearly four years in office — and across his endlessly hyped decades in the public eye — journalists, prosecutors, opposition politicians and conspiracists have, with limited success, sought to excavate the enigmas of his finances.”
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