Donald Trump has been complaining that the news media is “obsessed” with tax records from the 1990s. Which, he says, “Was a long time ago.”
Of course, there’s the little detail of Trump dipping back into the 1990s, and earlier, to attack Hillary Clinton based on things her husband either did. or was rumored to have done, at the time. But there’s also the vastly larger fact that Donald Trump hasn’t released any tax records since then. In fact, we wouldn’t even have the partial 1995 taxes if someone in Trump Tower hadn’t slipped it into a mail slot at the New York Times.
When trying to evaluate Donald Trump’s claims about his wealth and fiscal prowess, there’s really no choice except to look back at those few years where his business life became public. And those records? What they show is failure after failure and Donald Trump getting bailed-out by others.
It wasn’t just 1995. ...
All of the tax information that has been publicly revealed—The Washington Post published figures for 1978 and 1979 in May, Politico reported in June he had paid no taxes in 1991 and 1993, The New York Times published 1995 information last week and further information from the 1970s show the same thing: Trump paying little or no taxes because of poor financial performance and huge mistakes he made in his business.
Every peek we have into Trump’s finances show a man who was constantly overspending, constantly making wrong bets, constantly failing — and frequently being bailed out by daddy.
When Donald Trump said he was the king of debt he was being modest. Donald Trump is the god emperor of failure.
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In 1978, Trump’s father got the 33-year-old Donald a $35 million credit line for his budding real estate projects on the basis of the older Trump’s guarantee. How did that work out? It took Trump less than a year to blow through that money, through an extension, and end up begging for help.
In 1978, the same year that Fred Trump set up the credit line for his son at Chase Manhattan, Trump’s personal finances collapsed. By then, he had borrowed $38 million from his line of credit—the bank adjusted the available amount up by $3 million when Trump exceeded his credit limit. …
Unsurprisingly, given Trump’s bad business decisions, Donald’s taxes for 1978 showed personal losses of $406,379—that’s $1.5 million in present-day dollars—according to the information filed to the casino regulator.
We can also see Trump’s 1979 taxes, where he lost the equivalent of $11 million. Bank records for the time show that Trump had nothing approaching the amount of money in reserve to deal with these losses. In fact, the total of his available assets came to about a tenth of what he reported lost in a single year. How did Donald survive?
So Trump took the same route he did for the rest of that decade and in decades to come: He borrowed more to keep himself afloat. Apparently, no bank would lend him additional amounts, so he turned to his father to rescue him. On September 24, 1980, Fred Trump arranged for a series of loans totaling $7.5 million to his son, which Donald Trump used to pay down some of the debt on his personal credit line.
Without his father’s bailout, Trump would have run himself right off the table in his thirties and still be digging out of that hole.
It’s a pattern that repeated over and over. The only difference in the 1990s bankruptcies was that Trump had by then mounted losses so large and involved so many others in his disasters, that the banks were willing to work with him to restructure the losses.
The bottom line—no pun intended—is this: Trump is not a self-made man. He is a self-made disaster who only avoided personal bankruptcy thanks to his father being there to clean up his messes.
Trump’s pattern of borrowing to escape his current failure has been an expanding pattern. By 1995, he was down almost a billion. How much does he owe now, and who does he owe it to?
We have no way of knowing, unless Donald Trump releases his taxes.