(no subject)

[timelets]

As expected, Trump's most successful business was to play a successful businessman on TV and avoid paying taxes through real estate loopholes.

Comments

[chuka_lis]

ага, такой миллионер, что заплатил налогов меньше чем среднестатистический американец.

[tijd]

TRUMP: I have a great company. I have a tremendous income. And the reason I say that is not in a braggadocios way. It's because it's about time that this country had somebody running it that has an idea about money.
When we have $20 trillion in debt, and our country's a mess, you know, it's one thing to have $20 trillion in debt and our roads are good and our bridges are good and everything's in great shape, our airports. Our airports are like from a third world country. <...> Our country has tremendous problems. We're a debtor nation. We're a serious debtor nation. And we have a country that needs new roads, new tunnels, new bridges, new airports, new schools, new hospitals. And we don't have the money, because it's been squandered on so many of your ideas.
CLINTON: And maybe because you haven't paid any federal income tax for a lot of years. (APPLAUSE)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated/

[chuka_lis]

ну да, "фейк ньюс", все что у него не по шерстке.

[tijd]

July 2016, two days before “Russia, if you're listening...”:

DONALD TRUMP:
Let me give you a little lesson on tax returns. First of all, you don't learn very much from a tax return. I put in to the federal elections group 100 and some-odd pages of my financials. It showed, as you know, that I'm much wealthier than anybody even understood, okay? Tremendous cash, tremendous assets, tremendous all that stuff. Okay, that's it. I'm going through a routine audit. Just a routine audit, and I've had it for I think 14 years, 13 years--
CHUCK TODD:
Why?
DONALD TRUMP:
Every year they audit me. It's routine government. I would never give my tax returns until the audit's finished. But remember this: Mitt Romney, four years ago, was under tremendous pressure to give his tax returns. And he held it and held it and held it, and he fought it, and he, you know, he didn't do too well, okay? But he didn't do anything wrong on his taxes. When he gave his tax returns, people forget, not now. He gave them in September, before the election--
CHUCK TODD:
So you still might release them--
DONALD TRUMP:
No, wait a minute, wait a minute. When he did, and his tax returns are a tiny peanut compared to mine, they went through his tax returns. And they found one little sentence, another little-- there was nothing wrong. And they made him look bad. In fact I think he lost his election because of that.
CHUCK TODD:
Because of the tax returns?
DONALD TRUMP:
I think he lost. And I'll tell you why: He didn't do anything wrong. Mitt Romney did nothing wrong. But they would take out of, his weren't too big. Have you ever seen mine with the picture, they're like this high?
CHUCK TODD:
I have seen that picture, yes.
DONALD TRUMP:
Okay, so they took his tax return and they found a couple of little things. Nothing wrong, just standard. And they made him look very bad, very unfair.
https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-july-24-2016-n615706

One has to admit: as a con artist, he is not without talents. Washington Post tells a story of how, in 1990s, he tried to use his father’s dementia to cheat his siblings out of $1 billion inheritance https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/politics/donald-trump-father-will/

[timelets]

The problem is that millions of people are willing to have a proven con artist as their president.

[tijd]

The trustfulness of the American people is one of the sources of the country;s greatness. But it is also a vulnerability, like an immune system which gets weaponized by certain diseases to kill its host.

As for the art of the con, it is interesting how people sliding into dementia can be simultaneously cunning and manipulative. Unless it was a straight money-laundering operation, it was stupid to invest in money-losing golf courses. But it was not stupid to install a loyal IRS counsel.

President Trump earlier this year asked Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, to prioritize a confirmation vote for his nominee to be the chief counsel of the Internal Revenue Service, indicating that it was a higher priority than voting on the nomination of William P. Barr as attorney general, a person familiar with the conversation said.
White House aides insisted for months that the confirmation of the nominee, Michael J. Desmond, a tax lawyer from Santa Barbara, Calif., was a top priority after passage of the tax bill in 2017.
But the request by Mr. Trump, made to Mr. McConnell on Feb. 5, raised questions about whether the president had other motivations. For months, the president has seethed over vows by congressional Democrats that they would move to obtain his tax returns from the I.R.S. And this week, the House Ways and Means Committee chairman, Representative Richard E. Neal, Democrat of Massachusetts, formally asked the I.R.S. for six years of the returns, using an obscure provision in the tax code to do so.
On Thursday, asked if he would direct the I.R.S. not to disclose his tax returns, Mr. Trump said Democrats would have to talk to his lawyers.
“They’ll speak to my lawyers,” Mr. Trump said during remarks at the Oval Office. “They’ll speak to the attorney general.”
In July, when Mr. Desmond was first being considered by the Senate Finance Committee, Bloomberg reported that he had briefly advised the Trump Organization on tax issues before Mr. Trump took office. James Wilkinson, a spokesman for Mr. Desmond, told Bloomberg that Mr. Desmond had helped with “a discrete reporting matter for a subsidiary company that was resolved with no tax impact.”
In private practice, Mr. Desmond worked for a time alongside William Nelson and Sheri Dillon, who currently serve as tax counsels to the Trump Organization.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/us/politics/trump-michael-desmond-irs.html