Trump, il New York Times pubblica le dichiarazioni dei redditi: «Ecco le tasse pagate negli ultimi anni»

The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.

Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.

The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.

The New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office. It does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019. This article offers an overview of The Times’s findings; additional articles will be published in the coming weeks.

The returns are some of the most sought-after, and speculated-about, records in recent memory. In Mr. Trump’s nearly four years in office — and across his endlessly hyped decades in the public eye — journalists, prosecutors, opposition politicians and conspiracists have, with limited success, sought to excavate the enigmas of his finances. By their very nature, the filings will leave many questions unanswered, many questioners unfulfilled. They comprise information that Mr. Trump has disclosed to the I.R.S., not the findings of an independent financial examination. They report that Mr. Trump owns hundreds of millions of dollars in valuable assets, but they do not reveal his true wealth. Nor do they reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.

In response to a letter summarizing The Times’s findings, Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, said that “most, if not all, of the facts appear to be inaccurate” and requested the documents on which they were based. After The Times declined to provide the records, in order to protect its sources, Mr. Garten took direct issue only with the amount of taxes Mr. Trump had paid.

“Over the past decade, President Trump has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government, including paying millions in personal taxes since announcing his candidacy in 2015,” Mr. Garten said in a statement.

With the term “personal taxes,” however, Mr. Garten appears to be conflating income taxes with other federal taxes Mr. Trump has paid — Social Security, Medicare and taxes for his household employees. Mr. Garten also asserted that some of what the president owed was “paid with tax credits,” a misleading characterization of credits, which reduce a business owner’s income-tax bill as a reward for various activities, like historic preservation.

The tax data examined by The Times provides a road map of revelations, from write-offs for the cost of a criminal defense lawyer and a mansion used as a family retreat to a full accounting of the millions of dollars the president received from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.

Together with related financial documents and legal filings, the records offer the most detailed look yet inside the president’s business empire. They reveal the hollowness, but also the wizardry, behind the self-made-billionaire image — honed through his star turn on “The Apprentice” — that helped propel him to the White House and that still undergirds the loyalty of many in his base.

Ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life.

“The Apprentice,” along with the licensing and endorsement deals that flowed from his expanding celebrity, brought Mr. Trump a total of $427.4 million, The Times’s analysis of the records found. He invested much of that in a collection of businesses, mostly golf courses, that in the years since have steadily devoured cash — much as the money he secretly received from his father financed a spree of quixotic overspending that led to his collapse in the early 1990s.

Indeed, his financial condition when he announced his run for president in 2015 lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name.

As the legal and political battles over access to his tax returns have intensified, Mr. Trump has often wondered aloud why anyone would even want to see them. “There’s nothing to learn from them,” he told The Associated Press in 2016. There is far more useful information, he has said, in the annual financial disclosures required of him as president — which he has pointed to as evidence of his mastery of a flourishing, and immensely profitable, business universe.

In fact, those public filings offer a distorted picture of his financial state, since they simply report revenue, not profit. In 2018, for example, Mr. Trump announced in his disclosure that he had made at least $434.9 million. The tax records deliver a very different portrait of his bottom line: $47.4 million in losses.

Tax records do not have the specificity to evaluate the legitimacy of every business expense Mr. Trump claims to reduce his taxable income — for instance, without any explanation in his returns, the general and administrative expenses at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey increased fivefold from 2016 to 2017. And he has previously bragged that his ability to get by without paying taxes “makes me smart,” as he said in 2016. But the returns, by his own account, undercut his claims of financial acumen, showing that he is simply pouring more money into many businesses than he is taking out.

The picture that perhaps emerges most starkly from the mountain of figures and tax schedules prepared by Mr. Trump’s accountants is of a businessman-president in a tightening financial vise.

Most of Mr. Trump’s core enterprises — from his constellation of golf courses to his conservative-magnet hotel in Washington — report losing millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars year after year.

His revenue from “The Apprentice” and from licensing deals is drying up, and several years ago he sold nearly all the stocks that now might have helped him plug holes in his struggling properties.

The tax audit looms.

And within the next four years, more than $300 million in loans — obligations for which he is personally responsible — will come due.

Against that backdrop, the records go much further toward revealing the actual and potential conflicts of interest created by Mr. Trump’s refusal to divest himself of his business interests while in the White House. His properties have become bazaars for collecting money directly from lobbyists, foreign officials and others seeking face time, access or favor; the records for the first time put precise dollar figures on those transactions.

At the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., a flood of new members starting in 2015 allowed him to pocket an additional $5 million a year from the business. At his Doral golf resort near Miami, the roofing materials manufacturer GAF spent at least $1.5 million in 2018 even as its industry was lobbying the Trump administration to roll back “egregious” federal regulations. In 2017, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association paid at least $397,602 to the Washington hotel, where the group held at least one event during its four-day World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians.

The Times was also able to take the fullest measure to date of the president’s income from overseas, where he holds ultimate sway over American diplomacy. When he took office, Mr. Trump said he would pursue no new foreign deals as president. Even so, in his first two years in the White House, his revenue from abroad totaled $73 million. And while much of that money was from his golf properties in Scotland and Ireland, some came from licensing deals in countries with authoritarian-leaning leaders or thorny geopolitics — for example, $3 million from the Philippines, $2.3 million from India and $1 million from Turkey.

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Il New York Times è riuscito a entrare in possesso delle dichiarazioni dei redditi del presidente: Trump ha pagato 750 dollari di tasse federali l’anno in cui divenne presidente, altri 750 l’anno dopo, e zero per 10 dei 15 anni precedenti

Il New York Times è riuscito a entrare in possesso di alcuni dei documenti più ricercati — e più pervicacemente tenuti nascosti — degli ultimi anni: le dichiarazioni dei redditi del presidente degli Stati Uniti, Donald Trump.

I dettagli, pubblicati nella prima di una serie di puntate annunciate dal quotidiano, sono molto significativi: perché contrastano con l’immagine di successo che il presidente ha sempre voluto dare di sé e dei suoi affari, perché Trump è l’unico presidente nella storia contemporanea a non dichiarare quanto versato alle casse dello Stato che guida, e perché diverranno centrali nelle prossime, decisive settimane di campagna elettorale: a partire dal primo dibattito contro lo sfidante, il democratico Joe Biden.

Secondo quanto scrive il New York Times, dunque, Donald Trump ha pagato 750 dollari di tasse federali nell’anno in cui divenne presidente, il 2016; 750 dollari l’anno successivo, il primo trascorso alla Casa Bianca; e zero in 10 dei 15 anni precedenti alla sua elezione.

Il Times nota come — per un uomo, e un businessman, che ama presentarsi come un miliardario di successo — il livello della tassazione sia enormemente basso.

Secondo il quotidiano, Trump avrebbe adottato pratiche fiscali particolarmente aggressive, denunciando perdite che gli hanno consentito di giungere molto spesso ad azzerare il totale dovuto al governo federale.

Le carte mostrerebbero anche come Trump abbia debiti per centinaia di milioni, con diversi problemi legati alle proprietà della Trump Organization

Sul capo di Trump penderebbe anche una contesa con il fisco americano sulla regolarità di un «tax refund » da 72,9 milioni di dollari che Trump ha ottenuto dopo aver dichiarato vase perdite: in caso di pronunciamento avverso, il presidente potrebbe essere costretto a pagare oltre 100 milioni di dollari.

Le difficoltà nelle finanze personali del presidente, nota il quotidiano, rendono per lui vitali gli introiti da settori nei quali la sua posizione di businessman è in diretto conflitto di interesse con il ruolo pubblico che ricopre.

«Trump», scrive il New York Times, «sembra aver avuto più successo nell’interpretare il ruolo di grande imprenditore che non nell’esserlo davvero»

Uno dei legali di Trump, Alan Garten, ha detto al New York Times che «la gran parte, se non tutto ciò che viene riportato sembra impreciso».
Garten sostiene che il presidente abbia versato «decine di milioni di dollari di tasse al governo federale, anche a partire da quando ha annunciato la sua candidatura», cioè il 2015.

Trump ha definito lo scoop del New York Times «fake news», senza però offrire alcun dettaglio, nel corso di una conferenza stampa.

Bomba del New York Times sulle dichiarazioni dei redditi di Trump: «Società indebitate per milioni. Nel 2016 ha pagato 750 dollari di tasse» 

Nell’anno dell’elezione alla Casa Bianca, il presidente Usa ha pagato meno di 1.000 dollari in tasse sul suo reddito.
Per 10 anni invece ha versato zero, con le sue società che dichiaravano bilanci in profondo rosso

Il New York Times ha ottenuto diversi documenti che rivelano per la prima volta le dichiarazioni dei redditi di Donald Trump degli ultimi 20 anni. E quel che emerge sin dalle prime battute dell’inchiesta del quotidiano americano è che dietro l’immagine di imprenditore di successo che il presidente Usa ha costruito nel corso della sua carriera c’è una lunghissima serie di anni durante i quali non ha sostanzialmente mai pagato le tasse.

Nel 2016, anno in cui è diventato presidente degli Stati Uniti, Trump ha pagato solo 750 dollari di tasse federali sul suo reddito.
In 10 degli ultimi 15 anni, non c’è traccia di contributi al fisco federale da parte di Trump, che invece risulta da tempo indebitato per centinaia di milioni di dollari, con le imprese della Trump organization in fortissima difficoltà.
Proprio in virtù del denaro perso di anno in anno, le sue società hanno dichiarato di aver perso più denaro di quanto guadagnato, evitando così di versare denaro nella casse di fisco americano.

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