Long before Donald Trump came to haunt the American mindscape, he was already a ghost in my family history. My father, Howard J. Hendrix, was a tax clerk for the State of Ohio Department of Taxation, and had been so for the previous decade and a half when he encountered Mister Trump – age 26 and president of Trump Management -- in 1972. Tax questions had arisen in regard to the sale of the Trumps’ 1,154-unit Swifton Village apartment complex, in the Bond Hill section of Cincinnati. My father was tasked with looking into the matter.
In his 1987 memoir, The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump, in a section in which he refers to himself as “The Cincinnati Kid,” claimed Swifton Village was his first multimillion-dollar deal. This is not exactly true, as Gregory Korte’s 1 September 2002 Cincinnati Enquirer article, “Complex was troubled from the beginning,” makes clear. Swifton Village, built in 1953 by New York real estate developer Jonathan Woodner, was in 1962 foreclosed on by the New York State Employees Retirement System, which held a one-fifth share in the by-then delinquent property. The Federal Housing Administration had taken over the property by the time Donald’s father, Fred Trump (not Donald himself, as Donald later claimed), purchased the property in 1964 for $5.7 million at a sheriff’s sale.
In 1969, during Donald Trump’s tenure as manager, the property was embroiled in cases involving racial discrimination in housing, which the Trumps settled. In 1972, when the property was sold, the Trumps claimed to have put $500,000 into improving the property. The property sold that year for $6.75 million – which, taking the $500,000 claim at face value, meant a profit, over eight years, of about half a million dollars. A not inconsiderable sum, but by no means the mega-millions claimed by Donald Trump in Art of the Deal and elsewhere.
That much is public record. Now we enter the realm of ghosts.
My father died of pancreatic cancer in 1999 at the age of seventy-one. My mother and I were at his bedside when he passed, but a comment she made the night before that event – “Your father never made much money, but that never much bothered him” – has long stuck with me. My father was not ambitious in the usual fashion. He believed that, given the choice, it was more important to make sense of the world than to just make money off of its ways. He was always curious about and interested in people, wherever and whenever he met them, whoever they were -- and almost always thought well of them.
He did not think well of Donald Trump.
My father did not, as a rule, speak about his tax work or the people he met in the course of it. He considered such matters confidential. He made a small exception for Donald Trump, however. Although he steadfastly refused to go into details, he referred to the young Mister Trump as a “flimflammer” and “tax cheat.” At the time I had no idea who Donald Trump was -- this was the early 1970s, long before Trump had become a nationally known figure – but I do recall looking up the unfamiliar word “flimflammer” in the dictionary, thirteen year-old book geek that I was.
I suppose I would have just written off this Trump person as some forgettable, “spoiled rich brat set up in the family business by his daddy” (as my father also said of him), were it not that my father for years afterward mentioned his encounter with Trump, whenever Trump’s name came up in the news or on TV. That mention my father always accompanied with a shake of the head.
The memory seemed distasteful to him -- something touched upon but not lingered over, a scar healed over but not forgotten, a miscarriage of justice he had not been able to rectify. Over the years, about all I was able to glean was that my father’s contact with Donald Trump had something to do with that $500,000 in improvements the Trumps claimed to have made at Swifton Village during the course of their ownership.
Now, in 2016, it’s taxes again. Mister Trump is going against the tradition of all presidential candidates since Truman by refusing to release his tax returns. He claims he won’t release his 2012-2015 returns because they’re being audited, but releasing a return has no effect on an ongoing audit. There is, at any rate, a precedent. While a candidate for President, Richard Nixon released his tax returns, the fact that they were being audited notwithstanding.
Since he has already claimed that all audits are closed on his 1980 through 2011 tax returns, Mister Trump could certainly release those returns in full. He has chosen not to do so. For personal reasons, I would very much like to see the tax returns for Trump Management from 1972-73. Without such documentation, our family has little choice but to continue to speculate about what the Trumps were up to at Swifton Village, and why it persisted in my father’s memory until the very end.
According to the world’s accustomed accountings, my father was a good man, but not a great man. Mister Trump is a great man, but not a good man. I know that, aside from providing evidence of patterns -- racial discrimination, tax “avoidance,” the disaster capitalist’s penchant for making a fortune out of other people’s misfortunes – present from the very start of Donald Trump’s career and persisting to this day, the Swifton Village history probably doesn’t matter as much to most Americans as it does to me. Yet, as citizens, we too should not be left having to speculate.
Why the lack of transparency, Mister Trump? What are you afraid of in the release of those returns? Might they reveal that you are not so rich as you claim to be? Might they demonstrate long-standing patterns of how carefully you’ve avoided paying your fair share of taxes throughout your adult life? Might they show just how dependent your fortunes are on money from Russian oligarchs? Or Chinese bankers? What might they reveal? At some point, might the speculations become worse than the truth?
Release your returns, Mister Trump. After all, your campaign is trying to rebrand you as a kinder, gentler, more transparent Trump. Although in my family we may suspect that the leopard does not change his spots even when wrapped inside a suit of chameleon hide, what can you lose? Release your recent returns – promptly, and in full, not heavily redacted, or in the last minutes before the election. If not for the quiet of the soul of a departed tax examiner and his survivors, then at least for the peace of mind of the American electorate, release your returns.