Day 839: Trump defends financial status with apparent federal tax fraud admission

The New York Times published a bombshell of a story this week, detailing many of the findings of Donald Trump’s tax returns from 1985 to 1994. The documents paint a bleak picture about Trump’s finances and business acumen, including the fact that Trump may have lost more money than any other taxpayer in the United States during that time.

The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.

In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years.

But in the granular detail of tax results, it gives a precise accounting of the president’s financial failures and of the constantly shifting focus that would characterize his decades in business. In contrast to his father’s stable and profitable empire of rental apartments in Brooklyn and Queens, Mr. Trump’s primary sources of income changed year after year, from big stock earnings, to a single year of more than $67.1 million in salary, to a mysterious $52.9 million windfall in interest income. But always, those gains were overwhelmed by losses on his casinos and other projects.

The story is deeply humiliating for Trump, who wields his wealth and business skills as one of his primary weapons. No one tackishly brags about their own experience and money quite like Trump. The Times’ report shows that Trump’s claims about his money — like so much of the rhetoric out of his mouth — is just hot air.

So, like he is apt to do, he responded in the most bizarre way on Twitter: seeming to admit to tax and/or bank fraud.

The claims of “want[ing] to show losses for tax purposes” for “sport” to gain an edge with banks seems to pretty clearly admit to fraud. Trump is admitting to taking fake losses and using them to avoid paying federal income tax using the “everyone was doing it” excuse. (And while he gives credence to the Times’ report by replying directly to it, he tries to allege that the information is inaccurate.)

Only Trump could take a report that he was a terrible businessman and turn it into a public criminal confession.

839 days in, 623 to go

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