Yet even more striking than the eternal unsteadiness of his business dealings was Trump’s eternal fear of being seen as an unsteady businessman. One industry executive estimates that step alone would bring a 30% bump in the stock.” “Given that the low stock price seems partly a function of Wall Street’s allergic response to Trump’s flamboyance-analysts call it ‘the Donald factor’-the obvious solution would be for Trump to remove himself from management. “A couple of people close to Trump and otherwise sympathetic to him suggested to me that he’s unfit to be running a public company,” wrote Useem in 2000. But many of those who knew him well had their doubts. Trump denied furiously to Fortune then that he did anything amiss and dutifully swore to pay off his debts. It’s not just the $5 million bonus he drew one year, or the fact that the pilots of his personal 727 are on the casino company’s payroll… he had the already cash-strapped company lend him $26 million to pay off a personal loan from Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette.” “But most disquieting,” wrote Useem-in a magazine yarn that feels like it was written two days, not two decades, ago-was “Trump’s tendency to use the casino company as his own personal piggy bank. In a business where “the house always wins,” Trump’s casino company lost $134 million in 1999 (after special items and depreciation-a theme in the New York Times’ story, too), forcing S&P to lower it bond rating “from junk to junkier,” said Useem, who is now a contributing writer at The Atlantic. When Useem’s story was published in the Apedition of Fortune, Trump’s casino company was awash in $1.8 billion in high-yield debt-the servicing of which gobbled up $216 million of cash flow. In “ What Does Donald Trump Really Want?,” writer Jerry Useem took readers into a frenzied three-ring circus of bombast and leverage-where, somehow, even a thriving Atlantic City casino business could be nearly drowning in debt. Trump’s public persona, long before his run for the White House. In fact, two classic Fortune stories, written a generation ago, memorably captured this awkward incongruence in Mr. That revelation, of course, isn’t new at all. Trump’s own declarations to the IRS are to be believed, then he isn’t much of a businessman. But perhaps the most salient takeaway is simply this: If Mr. Trump seems to have claimed more than $70,000 in “business expenses” for hair styling during his stint on “The Apprentice” television show. Yes, there are plenty of eye-poppers in the Times’s reportage-including, for instance, that Mr. Trump’s “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.” 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,” said the newspaper’s Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire. The Times, which said it verified its account with both publicly available and confidential sources, noted that all of the President’s tax data “was provided by sources with legal access to it.” He reportedly paid nothing, too.Ī lawyer for the Trump Organization told the Times that its reporters’ claims “appear to be inaccurate” and asserted that “over the past decade, President Trump has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government.” The President, for his part, called the newspaper’s report “ FAKE NEWS.” In the decade and a half leading up to then, the New York real estate mogul, who boasted endlessly of his wealth and deal-making prowess, incurred so many millions of dollars in personal losses-as per his own sworn declarations to the IRS-that he “owed” nothing in income taxes in 10 of those years. The New York Times’s blockbuster report on President Trump’s taxes, published Sunday evening, offers no shortage of revelations: Trump, according to the Times, paid just $750 in federal income tax in 2016, the year he was elected President-and paid the same paltry sum in 2017, his first year in the White House.
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