The Most Brazen Trick Trump Tried to Pull on His Taxes

The explosive New York Times report on Donald Trump’s tax returns confirms a great number of things about the president’s finances we’ve only been able to speculate about for years. We now know that Trump really was telling the truth when he claimed, beginning in the 2016 presidential campaign, that he was being audited by the Internal Revenue Service (though such an audit would not prevent him from releasing his returns—that part he really did make up). We also now know—though we basically already did—that while Trump made a lot of money from The Apprentice, he really does love debt, and most of the businesses he’s actually run have lost a lot of money. All told, Trump has personally guaranteed about $421 million in debt, most of which will come due within the next four years.

The returns that the Times describes, stretching from 2000–17, raise a host of issues you would generally not want a president to have: There are foreign payments to Trump businesses (a possible influence on foreign policy), apparent fibbing about property valuations (Trump allegedly inflated the value of property he owned so that he could overstate the value of an environmental easement he claimed as a charitable deduction), and payments to his daughter as a consultant (even though he also employed her as a senior executive at his real estate company). One of the most stunning revelations—beyond the headline figure that Trump paid only $750 in taxes in 2016 and again in 2017—is of Trump’s attempt to get a refund from the IRS for $72 million in 2010 by claiming $1.4 billion in losses in 2008 and 2009, which would not only justify the refund but also wipe out any income tax he would owe for years to come. This request apparently triggered the audit we’ve heard so much about.