Some TV programs you should watch. If you haven’t been paying attention to the narrative arc of the Trump regime’s trainwreck, this Frontline program will catch you up.
Its wacky cousin is the now five episodes old, alternative universe version of it in Tom Arnold’s search for Trump tapes. However, this latest Showtime program on Trump taxes should be more compelling than the self-congratulatory Fourth Estate. As many have opined, this may be what brings the empire down.
And the president, who is 72, has spent about five decades pretending not only that his father never rescued him from bankruptcy but that he played a minimal role in his business successes.
“It has not been easy for me,” Trump said in 2015 during the presidential race. “My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars.”
As I noted in a column in 2016, Trump was lying when he said that — allowing him to also gloss over how central his father was to his career.
The Times also reported that Trump “received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire.” It added that those riches flowed more fully due to “dubious tax schemes [Trump] participated in during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud.” The Trumps did this, in part, by “grossly undervaluing” the properties they intended to pass on to their children. (A lawyer for Trump told the Times that the president, his parents and his siblings relied on outside advisers for tax planning purposes and that nothing they did was fraudulent.)
New York state tax authorities said that they plan to investigate the Trump family’s tax filings in response to the Times article, though given the amount of time that has passed since the Trumps used the techniques the article highlights it may be difficult for authorities to find wrongdoing.
One person who might be able to enlighten them is Allen Weisselberg, who was Fred Trump’s accountant and is now the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer. He recently entered into an immunity agreement to cooperate with federal prosecutors in Manhattan who have been investigating a Trump lawyer, Michael Cohen.