Susan Wright on the Right
Ok. Let’s be real.
Is there anyone out there to still doesn’t get that Donald John Trump got what wealth he does have from being a scoundrel and a tax cheat?
In fact, it’s a family tradition.
And yes, I’m saying this, fully aware that there are people in the Trumpian tribe who have somehow fallen into the meme-worthy fantasy of Trump as a blue collar worker, who began at the bottom, a lowly construction worker, who built his fortune by the sweat of his brow.
It’s hogwash.
The New York Times has been doing some digging.
Of that digging, it pretty much consisted of – If we can’t get Trump to reveal his tax returns, they’d just get his dad, Fred Trump’s old tax returns.
It was quite revealing.
Rather than being the self-made billionaire that he claims to be, shady tax practices by the elder Trump resulted in roughly $413 million raked in for Donald J. Trump, Sr.
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.
That’s quite the discrepancy.
Charles J. Harder, a lawyer for Trump, received the outline of the NYT story beforehand, and dismissed the findings as “false and highly defamatory.”
Mr. Harder sought to distance Mr. Trump from the tax strategies used by his family, saying the president had delegated those tasks to relatives and tax professionals. “President Trump had virtually no involvement whatsoever with these matters,” he said. “The affairs were handled by other Trump family members who were not experts themselves and therefore relied entirely upon the aforementioned licensed professionals to ensure full compliance with the law.”
Who wants to bet he blames his dead brother, Freddy, for the twisted numbers?
The president’s other brother, Robert, issued a statement on behalf of the Trump family.
“Our dear father, Fred C. Trump, passed away in June 1999. Our beloved mother, Mary Anne Trump, passed away in August 2000. All appropriate gift and estate tax returns were filed, and the required taxes were paid. Our father’s estate was closed in 2001 by both the Internal Revenue Service and the New York State tax authorities, and our mother’s estate was closed in 2004. Our family has no other comment on these matters that happened some 20 years ago, and would appreciate your respecting the privacy of our deceased parents, may God rest their souls.”
Sorry, Robert. Your brother ran for the presidency, touting himself as a “self-made” billionaire, promising to reveal his tax returns, then, mysteriously refusing.
He’s the first president to do that in decades. It has also long been rumored that much of Donald Trump’s wealth came from his connection to organized crime.
And let’s not forget his uncomfortable closeness to a host of Russian oligarchs and the Russian government.
There’s a reason Donald Trump is hiding his wealth.
It’s not like the newspaper didn’t dig for details to present this story.
They were thorough.
The findings are based on interviews with Fred Trump’s former employees and advisers and more than 100,000 pages of documents describing the inner workings and immense profitability of his empire. They include documents culled from public sources — mortgages and deeds, probate records, financial disclosure reports, regulatory records and civil court files.
The investigation also draws on tens of thousands of pages of confidential records — bank statements, financial audits, accounting ledgers, cash disbursement reports, invoices and canceled checks. Most notably, the documents include more than 200 tax returns from Fred Trump, his companies and various Trump partnerships and trusts. While the records do not include the president’s personal tax returns and reveal little about his recent business dealings at home and abroad, dozens of corporate, partnership and trust tax returns offer the first public accounting of the income he received for decades from various family enterprises.
So his family wealth is dirty.
Of that dirty Trump money, Donald Trump never had to scrape. His dad’s money made him rich, long before he became a tabloid name.
He’s no more a self-made billionaire than he is the “every man” his loyalists have attempted to label him as.
According to the NYT report, he was earning around $200,000 a year by the time he was 3. By the time he was 8, he was already a millionaire.
By the time he was out of college, his dad was giving him $1 million a year, growing to over $5 million a year by the time he was in his 40s and 50s.
That’s right. His dad was still paying his bills well into his 50s.
Fred Trump was relentless and creative in finding ways to channel this wealth to his children. He made Donald not just his salaried employee but also his property manager, landlord, banker and consultant. He gave him loan after loan, many never repaid. He provided money for his car, money for his employees, money to buy stocks, money for his first Manhattan offices and money to renovate those offices. He gave him three trust funds. He gave him shares in multiple partnerships. He gave him $10,000 Christmas checks. He gave him laundry revenue from his buildings.
Much of his giving was structured to sidestep gift and inheritance taxes using methods tax experts described to The Times as improper or possibly illegal. Although Fred Trump became wealthy with help from federal housing subsidies, he insisted that it was manifestly unfair for the government to tax his fortune as it passed to his children. When he was in his 80s and beginning to slide into dementia, evading gift and estate taxes became a family affair, with Donald Trump playing a crucial role, interviews and newly obtained documents show.
It’s not about the giving.
If I had that kind of wealth, my child would be getting that, and more.
The problem is the lying surrounding the gifts. And then there’s the “finessing” and stretching of tax laws.
But tax experts briefed on The Times’s findings said the Trumps appeared to have done more than exploit legal loopholes. They said the conduct described here represented a pattern of deception and obfuscation, particularly about the value of Fred Trump’s real estate, that repeatedly prevented the I.R.S. from taxing large transfers of wealth to his children.
“The theme I see here through all of this is valuations: They play around with valuations in extreme ways,” said Lee-Ford Tritt, a University of Florida law professor and a leading expert in gift and estate tax law. “There are dramatic fluctuations depending on their purpose.”
Trump and his siblings took control over their father’s properties in 1997. By undervaluing the property, the Trump crew managed to wiggle around hundreds of millions in gift taxes.
The most overt fraud was All County Building Supply & Maintenance, a company formed by the Trump family in 1992. All County’s ostensible purpose was to be the purchasing agent for Fred Trump’s buildings, buying everything from boilers to cleaning supplies. It did no such thing, records and interviews show. Instead All County siphoned millions of dollars from Fred Trump’s empire by simply marking up purchases already made by his employees. Those millions, effectively untaxed gifts, then flowed to All County’s owners — Donald Trump, his siblings and a cousin. Fred Trump then used the padded All County receipts to justify bigger rent increases for thousands of tenants.
Crooked.
Fred Trump apparently found that when you live a crooked life and pass those “values” to your overindulged children, sometimes, one of the students surpasses the master.
All told, The Times documented 295 streams of revenue that Fred Trump created over five decades to enrich his son. In most cases his four other children benefited equally. But over time, as Donald Trump careened from one financial disaster to the next, his father found ways to give him substantially more money, records show. Even so, in 1990, according to previously secret depositions, Mr. Trump tried to have his father’s will rewritten in a way that Fred Trump, alarmed and angered, feared could result in his empire’s being used to bail out his son’s failing businesses.
Being ruthless really must be a family trait. That story sounds a lot like the report that the three eldest children of Donald Trump – Donald Jr., Eric, and Ivanka Trump – had conspired to have their younger half-sister, Tiffany, cut out of their father’s will.
Guys, I’m worried about Barron.
The New York Times piece does give Donald Trump credit for being a master manipulator, who took his dad’s wealth and privilege, as well as the years of indulgence, and built up the fantasy of being a “self-made billionaire.”
He did so with [ghostwritten] books, licensing deals, and television appearances.
He created a myth.
The pinnacle of the illusion, however – Trump Tower – was built with Fred Trump’s money.
And I’ll go so far as to say, even though the trickery involved in building the Trump fortune was corrupt, I won’t fault Fred Trump for at least caring enough about his kids to cut them in. He wasn’t planning on taking any of it with him.
He just didn’t realize the kind of monster he’d created.
The biggest payday he ever got from his father came long after Fred Trump’s death. It happened quietly, without the usual Trumpian news conference, on May 4, 2004, when Mr. Trump and his siblings sold off the empire their father had spent 70 years assembling with the dream that it would never leave his family.
Donald Trump’s cut: $177.3 million, or $236.2 million in today’s dollars.
I guess family legacies don’t mean as much as the bottom line, to some.
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