Donald Trump is a brilliant businessman. At least that's what Donald Trump says. However, his tax returns paint a completely different picture.
Donald Trump emphasizes that he is an extremely successful businessman. He tells the US tax authorities the opposite. According to this, the former US President has sunk hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years.
That comes from Trump's tax returns from the years 2015 to 2020, which the Treasury Committee of the US House of Representatives has published after years of litigation. The real estate entrepreneur claimed huge losses for tax purposes at the time and therefore paid little or no income tax at federal level for a few years - even though he repeatedly claims to be immeasurably rich.
In numbers, Trump paid only $750 in income tax to the Treasury in 2016, the year he was elected, and in 2017, his first year in the White House. In 2019, the total was around $133,000. In the last year of office, 2020, Trump paid no income tax to the federal government. He was able to do this because he listed a whopping $246 million in losses from various projects in his tax return from 2015 to 2018 alone.
One notable exception: In 2018, he had nearly $26 million in revenue, which resulted in him paying nearly $1 million in income taxes for that year. However, this income was not the result of projects that Trump had launched. Trump parted with these over the years, usually with great losses. In order to achieve the high proceeds in 2018, Trump sold various investments that his father - a successful and very wealthy real estate developer - had made and inherited from Trump. The lion's share was a real estate project in Brooklyn, New York, from the 1970s that Trump sold for $14 million.
The picture painted by Trump's tax returns corresponds to what the "New York Times" reported during Trump's ending presidency based on the tax documents it received, which lasted up to 2018. According to this, Trump burned hundreds of millions of dollars with some of his projects.
Trump used his notoriety to get money. He licensed his name, made it available for others' projects and collected fees for it. He put most of this income into his ailing businesses to keep them afloat. According to the newspaper, Trump pumped more money into many of his deals than he got out.
Some of the projects failed and went bankrupt, such as Trump's casinos in Atlantic City. When one of the casinos went bankrupt alone, creditors lost around $1 billion and more than 1,000 people lost their jobs. Other projects only survived because they were either sold or creditors came to Trump and canceled part of the debt because a bankruptcy would have cost them more money.
Trump was resurrected through the popular reality show "The Apprentice," in which he portrayed a highly successful businessman from 2004 to 2015. She put him in the limelight and caused a rain of money. The New York Times put his earnings from the show at more than $400 million.
When the show was cancelled, Trump was running for the Republican presidential nomination, probably to keep the conversation going. But then the completely unexpected happened: he not only became a candidate, but even a president. The Trump brand was suddenly more valuable than ever.
Meanwhile, Trump sold setbacks and bankruptcies to the public as clever restructuring. The losses recorded on his tax returns are proof to him that he is a smart businessman who makes good use of perfectly legal write-offs and other tax benefits.
The business magazine "Forbes" comes to a different conclusion. In Trump's first campaign in 2016, Trump's net worth was estimated at around $5 billion. According to the most recent estimate in the fall of last year, there were still $3.2 billion left. Trump calls these numbers "fake news." According to him, he is worth at least 10 billion dollars.
