Trump is either a tax fraud or the world’s worst businessman.
But given how much revenue Trump generates — according to the Times report — from his resorts and other businesses, for him to make the math work one of two things has to be true: If these 1/
washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/0…
tax documents are real and Trump is telling the truth in them, then they show that the president is a real estate failure of epic proportions. The alternative would seem to be that he’s defrauded the government — and maybe even broken federal tax laws. Trump is unlikely to be 2/
comfortable with either possibility.
But if the Times’s reporting is accurate, Trump claims to be a business failure on a massive scale. According to the report, he initially paid a combined $95 million in federal income tax on his “Apprentice” income, but was able to obtain 3/
a $72.9 million dollar tax refund, with interest, once he declared losses. The Times estimates those losses would have had to reduce his average annual income to $1.4 million a year between 2000 and 2017 to justify the tax refund, meaning Trump would have had to lose hundreds 4/
of millions of dollars on bad deals over the years. Trump would appear to have the business acumen of an ’80′s hair band that invested one-hit-wonder money developing custom ringtones for beepers. 5/end
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