I’ve mentioned this before, but here I go again: I have a Bachelor’s degree in Economics. And yet I really don’t understand the tax code or tax laws at all, probably because Economics is more about monetary and fiscal policy and unions and game theory and sh-t (IDK, I barely remember). I don’t even think there was any kind of Economics class about tax codes and tax laws, at least not at my college. Anyway, that’s my way of prefacing this story: I have no idea what this means, but I know it’s really bad. I know it’s bad because journalists and “numbers people” and lawyers are freaking the f–k out about it. The story? The New York Times did an incredibly deep dive into the Trump family’s assets and tax shenanigans and Fred Trump’s massive estate. You can read the full piece here:
Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents, an investigation by The New York Times has found. https://t.co/5mcajYqaYJ
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 2, 2018
Pick your headline/summary/takeaway:
*Donald Trump received at least $413 million from his father over the decades, much of that through dubious tax dodges, including outright fraud. Remember, Bigly claimed he only got a $1 million loan from his daddy.
*Donald Trump and his father, Fred, avoided gift and inheritance taxes by setting up a sham corporation and undervaluing assets to tax authorities. BUT HIS TAX RETURNS.
*Trump’s parents, the paper says, citing tax records, gave over a billion dollars to Trump and his siblings and paid $52.2 million in taxes on the money. However, the dollar amount could have required at least $550 million in taxes, according to the Times analysis.
*The New York Times claims it has 100,000 pages of financial documents, including confidential tax returns from the father and his companies. WHERE? HOW?
Also, this:
The New York State Tax Department is looking into the NYT report on Trump and his family's business dealings.
"The Tax Department is reviewing the allegations in the NYT article and is vigorously pursuing all appropriate avenues of investigation." https://t.co/xkUNjNAL5q
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 2, 2018
PS… Would Bob Mueller hand over 10,000 documents to the NYT just as an appetizer for the buffet of indictments to come?
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
Is anyone surprised? Let’s see if 45 is using the same scam for his own children and grandchildren
There’s something about a property sale to Eric…
Yeah, wasn’t the winery golf course bought by Eric for $1.00? And yet, he will still be President until at least 2020. F–king leech.
He certainly has been/is. The tax planning that is described in the second and third bullet points is what I did with the first 10-12 years of my law career. Because Kaiser said she didn’t get this stuff I can give a little primer. What wealth families do is form business entities (partnerships usually, sometimes LLCs, because these types of entities don’t pay income tax) and then they move their assets, including real estate and investments, into the partnership. When they form the partnership, they create a partnership agreement that creates restrictions on the partners’ ability to sell their interests, including, in some cases, a right of first refusal in the other partner/s to purchase the “exiting” partner’s interest at an amount that doesn’t correspond to the value of the underlying assets.
Then mommy/daddy set up a trust for the kids and gift partnership interest to the trust, but state the value of the partnership at a discount (often up to 40-50%) because the partnership agreement establishes restrictions that would diminish the marketable value of being a partner, which then means they pay less estate/gift tax than they would if the assets were not inside a partnership.
Why didn’t the New York Times do this BEFORE he was elected?? When he wouldn’t disclose his tax returns?? If this can do it now, they could have done it then…WHYYYYY
Everyone needs to listen to the 2-part Drumpf episode of “The Dollop” podcast. It goes pretty in-depth into the evils of Fred and DJT.
It’s Tax fraud that ultimately always takes down evil people..
Yep, and the only plausible source for this article is Trump’s cousin who ran the scam. The article mentions his basement full of boxes of documents. Guess he isn’t on the MAGA train.
Is that a cousin he cut out of the will? Donald secretly rewrote his father’s will to cut out the kids of his (deceased) alcoholic brother.
IRS has potential to sock it to him. The state will have to rake through thousands of records to find something within the time limits if they can charge. Its won’t be a quick process.
Oh my gahhhh! Bring it on. #LockThemUp
Oh yeah, this is gonna get good! Don’t forget, Mueller gave Allen Weisselberg FULL IMMUNITY. This means his evidence was SO GOOD as to where all the financial records/bodies are buried that it was worth it not to go after him. While statues of limitations have passed for criminal indictments for probably all of that stuff, CIVIL ones have not (Godspeed NY State!!!). And you know with that much money involved, the IRS is going to want to take a look, too. AND now it makes you wonder what did daddy dearest set up to hide $$$$$$ for his kids, esp. dear daughter wife, and grandkids.
Jill Wine-Banks said during Watergate (she was one of the Prosecutors) they always had multiple copies of everything, and leaked things judiciously in case of being closed down. Wouldn’t doubt Mueller and team wouldn’t do the same, to make sure his info gets to see the light of day and not be buried.
Way back during the first few months of the investigation, I remember hearing on MSNBC or CNN one of the experts who knew Mueller say that – knowing Mueller – he has lots of contingency plans if/when he is fired. I have clung to that for over a year now – that he is so smart and so good and has the actual “best people” around him that the moment trump tries to pull anything, an anvil will drop.
I love the way you think. Also a refreshingly accurate use of “best people” for a change
Trump Has always been scared of showing his tax returns. We know that’s where the real dirt is . This is just the tip of the iceberg . And it looks terrible. Go get them, Uncle Sam.
Exactly. If he is as rich and as honest as he claims to be, you’d think he’d want to show off by showing everyone his tax returns. He’s a crooked POS, and things are definitely looking terrible
The MAGAcult talking point re trumped up taxes is :don’t ask for what you don’t understand. So while the non estate person might not “understand”, obv we can hire financial archaeologists!
Exactly @Repunzel. His/their downfall was always going to be about their finances and taxes. Money laundering is going to be another big one. That’s his link to the Russian mob.
No surprise at all. We all knew something like this happened, and that Trump must’ve gotten a lot more than the “tiny loan” of one million dollars from his father that he always talked about. He’s no honest, self made millionaire who made a fortune by being a successful business man. He’s been bankrupt multiple times, had many unsuccessful failing businesses, and is only still around because he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. If these crimes are proven, LOCK HIM UP
As always its the taxman that brings these crooks down, go IRS. #LockHimUp #HisTaxReturns
None of this is a surprise but it really explains why Trump has such an inferiority complex. He knows he nothing more than a trust fund baby who has lived off daddy his whole life. He’s been a complete failure as a businessman and I’m sure his father constantly told him that. His only success has been as a con man and getting people to believe the BS.
It’s truly been a sales pitch – con job on the public for decades. Who else ever lost millions on a casino?
I would love to have been a fly on the wall this morning when he saw the actual front page. It’s covered with document copies, and pages of in-depth reporting.
I don’t think trump had an inferiority complex but a narcissist who sold his cheese whiz brand to the sociopath Putin.
Well known in NYC and commercial real estate circles (both of which I have been involved in) that poo-baby is a bad at business and that daddy bailed him out during the 90s. The extent to which daddy bailed him out IS news.
And yeah this potentially has huge financial implications for the extended Trump clan, including his federal judge sister..
Yes! I worked for a high end metals company in the early 2000s and we started to go after public art projects, including ones at Trump properties. We were warned off the trump projects by multiple construction industries we were friends with because Trump did not pay his bills. I don’t know how any of those properties get built he’s burned so many tradesmen.
He doesn’t actually build anything anymore. The extent of his involvement is licensing the “Trump” name to other people’s ventures.
The best revenge will be when his name becomes worthless to licence. It’s already happened in Canada and it’s going to happen in the US. Even the dumps who don’t get jail time aren’t going to be able to escape from this.
Trump is a liar, fraud, and crook? Color me shocked. (Not.). The real pisser about this story is that even if NY opens a civil investigation into this, once Kavanaugh gets on the bench, he’ll vote on the case that’s before the bench next month that will make presidents immune from state prosecution, and Trump will still get off scott-free.
I’ve been shouting about that all over the internet. They’re playing a long game to escape justice.
Read an article on CNN about this last night. IIRC the article stated that Trump, by age 4, was gett $200,000 a year and by age eight was a millionaire. So something here does not smell right. I hope this brings him down.
That’s a lot of candies and comics one child can buy.
🙂
NYT is very thorough. He’s a thief and scam artist just like his family.
Look at him in the first pic with his tiny baby hands raised in the Nixon-esque ‘I am not a crook’ fashion. Suuure you’re not little man.
Dear God lock him UP already.
This is no surprise to me, but the big problem with this, is that the Trump voters don’t care. Bad behavior, misogyny, tax fraud, colluding with the Russians, tax loop holes for the rich, calling Dictators good guys, making fun of people with disabilities or women who have been assaulted, anti immigrant policies and many other topics it doesn’t persuade them to not support him. It just goes to show me just how dark and disturbing people can be.
Remember when he said he loves the uneducated? This is why..his supporters can’t process simple facts, let alone anything financial, so he can feed them conspiracy theories that they can routinely regurgitate as proudly as a child who’s memorized abc’s.
It’s part ignorance, part racism, part religion-backed misogyny (and hatred of LGBTQ people). It’s still all about that Supreme Court seat to so many people.
Actually this they would have cared about if the press had pushed it. His followers like his racism, sexism and xenophobia but it also more powerful (versus other GOP’ers) because they see him as an aspirational figure of wealth. He has built a myth around himself that makes him a rockstar to his cult.
Finding out that Trump has been living his whole life on allowances from his father and had to be bailed out of lots of failed businesses would have made a differences. He is not selfmade. He is a useless trustfund baby his entire like and Putin has been his Daddy for the last couple of decades. His fans like his bad behavior but knowing he is no different than a grown man still living in his parents basement would have mattered. Hard to give him respect!
For his rich cult members, now that they have their tax cuts and deregulation, how proud are they going to be to support a pathetic businessman?
I always remember what Hillary told him during one of their debates. She said you Not paying your taxes is taking money away from keeping the country safe, eg, money for airports, police, army ect . The dotard replied, “that makes me smart”. This man has been a liar, a thief and a conman all his life. Lots of us on this board has been calling this conman out for over two years. Whatever the NYT reports today we have known for years. Don’t forget how he filed bankruptcies for casinos, who goes broke running a casino or two. Then the government had to eat $900,000 dollars he skipped out on.
I know that they’re just unfortunately timed photos, but I can’t help but be struck by how 45 and Kavanope look like howler monkeys/braying jack**ses.
Picture(s) worth a thousand words.
Don The Con – that’s he new nickname. I wonder what outrages distraction he will use this time?
I read the piece in the NYT and wondered if Fred was afraid of his son, did anyone else think that? Sending him away to military school, then continually covering for his son’s ineptitude, allowing the son’s grandiose delusions to fester. The descriptions of T throwing rocks at a small child, almost throwing a classmate out a window, etc. The sociopathy may have been clear to the father all along… Just a thought…
I get the feeling Fred thought his son was a moron and he knew he would never be able to support himself. I think Trump acting out was the only way he had to get his father to acknowledge him. He couldn’t get attention and praise for being smart or accomplished so in his head this was the only we he could get it. And I’m sure the more DT acted this way the more his father thought him useless…. never ending spiral….
Maybe, but he didn’t do anything like that for the other son. I was talking w someone from Turkey yesterday and she said they laugh back home that at least there’s now someone crazier than Erdogan…
I think Fred treated Donald like Donald treats Jr. and Eric. Apparently Daddy Trumps always have a favorite child.
Fred Trump handed Donald a prefab real estate business that he thought Donald couldn’t muck up, in hopes that would keep the kid from having to live under a bridge (or worse, coming back to live with his parents). But Donald couldn’t even manage to do that right.
The combination of arrogance and stupidity is pretty fatal. Without his father’s money, Donald would never have been able to continue. He just didn’t have the smarts or knowledge to succeed on his own, but he wasn’t smart enough to know that he didn’t know enough.
I think they’re all probably narcissists to some extent, and they just dealt with it the way all rich people do – paying somebody else to take care of the problem and clean up the mess.
NPR had a really interesting bit tonight about Trump trying to get his dear old dad to sign an altered will…after he had developed dementia. Stand up guy, that DJT. Stand up guy.
There is a layer to this story that will hopefully get attention. Part of the schemes involved overcharging veterans and low-income folks for housing (for decades). Apparently Zero’s dad made Eisenhower furious over profiteering on WWII veterans and federal housing programs, so this goes back to the 1950s.
Daily Beast covered the Ike-Fred issues in depth in a 2015 article (it’s a good bit infuriating read). The family has allegedly milked the government for 60 years.
The rotten apples and the tree…
Yes, I learned some of this on a recent Netflix special. It’s hard to stomach
The scheme is alive and well. Kushner is taking advantage of people in his buildings is overcharging and being a slumlord and Michael Cohen was charged in a scheme with shaking down tenants and I’m sure Don the Con has been doing the same. The entire family are con artists from the daddy, wife #3, grand father, grandmother, grand sons and grand daughter. God help us all.
Here is a Bigly laugh for today. Don The Con says he’s going sue the NYT, I prey he does so all his skeletons will come out. Btw, he’ll will never ever Sue NYT, he does not want the entire Con Family going down in flame.
The one aspect they haven’t really covered yet is how Fred was tied to the mob. His links to Meyer Lanksey are there for anyone to see. And when the Russian mob took over in the late 80s, well that’s how Putin got tied in with orange idiot.
That’s kind of a “no sh*t Sherlock” to anybody who understands just how much a billion dollars really is. It takes money to make money, but I’m totally not surprised these people are tax dodgers. All ultra-wealthy are, and Trump has always been notoriously bad at business for anybody who followed his escapades in the 90s.
You’re right about economics degrees being more macroeconomically focused these days, though. My brother encountered more of the tax code in his finance classes than he ever did his economics ones for his business degree.
His father was a dirt bag criminal slum lord.
Trump has known mob ties to the Russians and Italians. Look at the names on the payrolls for his buildings in the 80’s and 90’s.
He should never have been allowed to run. His occupation of the White House is part of a larger terror plot using controlled chaos to minipulate the public and destroy our society. But y’all already know that.
Some of us do, and some of us don’t.
Dismayed to see friends in the real world already arguing about the 2020 presidential race. Let’s hope we get there. In 5 weeks comes the truly consequential election.
Off to make donations….
Peace and respect to you. Thank you for donating to the fight.
So, we now have proof that he was never a true billionaire. That is gonna tic him off while he is tweeting with a Big Mac in his hand.
I started reading this article last night but it was so long and with all the complicated tax stuff, I understood only half of it. I just knew whatever the NYT had unleashed was a massive expose about the shady background of Trump’s finances which goes back decades. Not sure this will actually do anything in the long run but if it gets the IRS’s attention somehow, I welcome it.
There are Trump supporters right now or moderates on the “I’m sure about this guy but would still vote for him” who say they voted for Trump because he is a successful business man that built himself up. A billionaire boy pulled himself up but the bootstraps. Yet they still trash the Clintons who both came from impoverished or a middle class background. Earned their own education no Daddy helped them with millions and self-built themselves up. Yet, they hate them with vengeance. Trump voters are true hypocrites with brain fart thinking.
They make excuses for everything bc they don’t want to admit that they voted for a lying criminal.
As much as I despise Donald Trump I have to remember he got screwed up by his family. He’s a broken person. So let’s just feel sorry for him and impeach him and move on. These damaged people suck the life out of you.
Let’s impeach but never feel sorry for him. He’s a monster, jmo.
He’s had plenty of time and resources to examine himself and choose to do better. It takes real talent to maintain an utter lack of intellectual curiosity and self-reflection into his age.
Mel, my family sucked, too. I’m not a sociopath. Everyone’s family kinda breaks them.
There is a line.
Or, get help.
Just think: how many families had to suck to allow their kids to grow up and vote for this thing??
I don’t EVER feel sorry for a free-willed genuinely cold hearted garbage person. They don’t relate to “sorry”
Lock em up.
Whatever. BUT THE EMAILS !!!!!!
What about the CHILDREN!!!!!
Fry bitches. 🤣🙃
Maybe karma let him become prez (*cough Russia, Powers that be, cough*) so his evil ass would be wiped out. Look, I’m just trying to find meaning here.
I am enjoying this beautiful demise. So many of his ilk will go down, in time, with him. Ugly little trolls. Buhbye 😗
It’s nice that they did such a thorough job of documenting all this. But my reaction to the NYT story was “Yeah, so the sky is blue. We already knew that.”
Long before I knew Trump had political ambitions, even casually glancing at business news showed he was a perpetual goofup bailed out by his dad. He was always a joke, a terrible businessman who repeatedly made bad decisions. He continues to overspend on projects, strangling their profitability from the very beginning. He was advised that his overspending on the DC hotel (in the historical old post office building) was so bad that he would have to put an impossible price on the rooms just to break even. Sure helped to have foreign hotel customers who thought staying in Trump’s hotel gave them an edge in negotiations with Trump’s Administration.
Besides the multiple bankruptcies, Trump kept getting sued by vendors and contractors because he wouldn’t pay the bills as agreed. He was a typical bad payer – we have them in my area also, and if I get even a whiff of trouble about late or non-payments by an agency or if I just don’t know them at all, I insist on payment in advance before even scheduling the translation work. Like Trump, the bad translation agencies will try to claim that there was a “quality problem” and that’s why they chop down the bill or won’t pay at all. Trump actually drove small businesses into bankruptcy because they looked at the glitter and assumed he was too rich to fail to pay his bills.
After his dad was no longer in the picture, Trump defaulted so much that US banks wouldn’t finance him anymore. Do you know how bad you need to be for that to happen?!?
I think Trump simply decided it was easier to pretend to be a great businessman than to actually become one. He still is pretty fuzzy about basic financial/economic concepts (I suspect he took the rich kid’s short-cut to his garden-variety very basic bachelor’s degree in economics, he certainly didn’t study to get it). His enterprises don’t have to be profitable because that’s not how he makes his money. They are most likely just fronts for the real business, such as money laundering.
It was all there in public in standard respectable business news over the past few decades. And yet his supporters were dumb enough to take his word for it that he was a great businessman. His voice and body language scream flim flam man to me, I can’t imagine why all this wasn’t dug into more deeply during the campaign. Just a child’s sandbox shovel would have been enough to show that he was lying about how great he was in business.