Thread by @AlexandraErin

Here is what Ryan Ellis hopes you're not enough of a "tax expert" to understand about the Trump story and his thread: Trump's tax strategy has his losses so well-placed they will "offset over time" until he's dead. He never pays taxes and never will.

It may be that what Donald Trump is doing is perfectly legal! And yet, he seems to be constantly fighting with the IRS over it, an organization that is known to ignore transgressions by those powerful enough to give them a headache over it to go after easier small fries instead.

So he may or may not ever be found guilty of tax crimes, but @RyanLEllis is certainly enough of a tax expert to understand that "legal" and "illegal" aren't binaries in this area; there's what one person can get away with, and what one can't.

The picture that Ellis paints of Trump's business having "gushers" of income and outgo... the thing is, this is not the picture that Trump paints for the public or the IRS. He has two conflicting versions of the Trump Organization that are mutually exclusive.

The rosy (or gilded) picture he paints for the public, for his suckers and marks among the general public and anyone in the investor class who doesn't already have his number, is that of a financial powerhouse.

For the IRS, he portrays the same company as a wretched failure.

Did I say company? I shouldn't say company. There's no such company as the Trump Organization. That's why it's called an Organization and not, say, Trump, Inc. It's shell companies all the way down. Hundreds of businesses he owns on paper.

None of them give him any income?

The emerging right wing meme is that Trump is paying no taxes because he has no income, because he gives his salary away to charity and he divested from his companies.

Except: he paid more taxes in 2016 and 2017 than he for more than a decade before. And he never divested.

He was going to divest, then there was going to be a blind trust, then there was a handshake agreement that the boys would stay out of politics and he'd stay out of business (AND HOW DID THAT PROMISE TURN OUT?). He still owns everything!

The question is not: is it legal for a person or company to employ legal strategies to minimize their tax burden.

The question is rather: what does Trump's "high velocity" tax strategy reveal about his business dealings?

And the answer is: he's not a businessman.

He's not a businessman, not in the sense we usually mean it and not in the sense that he portrays himself. His goal isn't to make money, it's to keep money moving around in such a way that enough passes through his hands that he can maintain his lifestyle.

It's not even that his businesses fail. It's that he doesn't set "make money and sustain themselves" as a goal for his businesses. It suits is purposes just fine if the businesses slowly collapse under their own weight, so long as he can dip his beak and they look good for a bit.

The part where he has a big fancy building with his name on it that people can see and he can point to? He cares about that. Doesn't need the building to be profitable. It just has to exist. Inertia will keep it standing up long enough for its image to boost his.

I mean, his "real estate portfolio" is full of buildings he doesn't even own and didn't build, where someone paid him to license his famous name because it's on so many successful buildings, it must add value. He then claims those buildings as assets/successes/experience...

...to get people to pour money into his next actual project, which he allows to fall to pieces while he lives off the investment/loans.

He's good enough at stalling ("offsetting over time", to borrow from Ryan Ellis) that his projects take long enough to fall apart for him to line up the next one, and often by the time the doors close completely he's already moved on, leaving his investors/partners on the hook.

His infamous Atlantic City casinos weren't owned by him any more when they actually closed; to a lot of people, it makes sense that he's been a scapegoat. They were open when he ran them, they must have been successful! Then he leaves and they close? Sounds like he did good.

Do we have the right to know that someone who makes a living portraying himself as successful is pleading poverty to the IRS?

I would agree with Ellis that in general, we actually don't.

But Trump is not a general case. There's a reason we want to see presidents' financials.

I somehow find myself doubting that Ellis would say employers have no right to run an applicant's credit or do a financial background check before hiring someone for a sensitive position.

We are Donald Trump's employer.

We are his employer, and to the extent that we had any say in him getting the job... those among us who *were* swayed, they were swayed in part based on his claims of being a rich and successful businessman.

Then there's the security concerns.

That Donald Trump is a con man who was running out of fresh pastures and unburned bridges is itself a matter of national concern, but the fact that he is on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars, and to who... that is something we have a right and need to know about.

We have a right and a need to know what obligations our so-called president is operating under. We have a right and a need to know who owns him.

And of course Ellis's answer to this may be, as Trump's has been, that if the American people wanted Trump's tax returns they wouldn't have voted for him without seeing them.

But Trump ran on the promise to release them. He ran saying it was no big deal, we would see them.

And then after he was sworn in, he shifted and said that since he won without showing them that proved we didn't need to see them.

Now Ellis may be right that someone who leaked the tax returns could be found guilty of a crime, just as he's right in suggesting that Donald Trump may never be found guilty of any tax crimes.

He wants us to think this has something to do with right and wrong.