Day 621: Trump’s million dollar lie: dad actually gave him $400 million more than he claims
Inheriting and scheming were Trump’s path to the top.
Donald Trump claimed for years that he built an empire off a “small” loan of $1 million from his father, Fred Trump.
Trump claimed the amount is microscopic compared to “what [he] built.”
As The New York Times meticulously uncovered Tuesday, the number doesn’t even come close to how much Trump was given and the shady manner in which he was able to dodge taxes. Reviewing over 100,000 documents — including confidential information and tax returns from Fred and Trump-based businesses — the Times was able to piece together the vastness and source of so much of the Trump family’s wealth.
Trump has claimed that his loans from his father had to be repaid — with interest. There’s evidence they weren’t repaid at all.
Fred was funneling money to his son as toddler. Not only that but Fred’s money continues to flow to his son to this day, to the tune of nearly a half a billion dollars.
But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.
Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.
These maneuvers met with little resistance from the Internal Revenue Service, The Times found. The president’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate then imposed on gifts and inheritances.
The Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax records show.
Had he done nothing but invest in funds tracking the Standard & Poor’s 500, the Times noted, Trump would be worth nearly $2 billion today.
The Times goes into immense detail about the level of deception and crookery that the Trumps orchestrated to avoid paying taxes, with Trump frequently at the center of things. Tax experts seem to agree: there was real fraud that went beyond merely exploiting loopholes.
Trump also used his father’s empire to get himself out of debt after Fred died. Despite robust returns, Trump pushed his siblings to sell off virtually all of the real estate that his father owned when Trump said the market had peaked. Not only was the market far from its apex, Trump made a rotten deal because he needed the money badly, with creditors hounding him for cash. He orchestrated a sale that ended up with the family pocketing hundreds of millions dollars less than Fred’s empire was actually worth.
Trump, despite promising to do so for years, has failed to release his tax returns to the American people and has frequently claimed he’s always paid his fair share of taxes. The exhaustive reporting by the Times opens fresh questions about the man who claims to be both self-made and a billionaire and how, exactly, he got to where he is today.
621 days in, 841 to go
Follow us on Twitter at @TrumpTimer
