How bad were genius businessman Donald Trump's business losses in 1995? At $916 million, it's about this bad.
As Alan Cole from the conservative Tax Foundation notes, total net operating losses claimed on all individual income tax returns in 1995 amounted to $49.3 billion.*
That is, in that year, Trump claimed nearly 2% of all the net negative business income on individual tax returns in the entire country.
The spin on this one looks to be that the massive losses show Donald Trump is a genius. No non-genius could ever crater his businesses into the ground to such an extent as to wipe his future tax burden clean for the next twenty years; it takes a master businessman to do that. Now that's presidential material.