"How Did Trump Live So Large While Reporting Such Huge Losses?"

Real estate developers in the 1980’s & 1990’s, more than 30 years ago, were entitled to massive write offs and depreciation which would, if one was actively building, show losses and tax losses in almost all cases. Much was non monetary. Sometimes considered “tax shelter,” ……

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 8, 2019

Real-estate developer Donald Trump in 1992 lived in a New York luxury apartment, traveled by limousine and had personal bodyguards. That year, he also reported a negative $750 million adjusted gross income to the IRS.

How the future president could live so large while reporting such huge losses has been a question since the New York Times revealed a decade of Trump’s tax information last week. While the president claims there were paper losses that could be chalked up to real-estate activities, four tax experts said that for the president to have claimed such a giant negative income, his businesses must have bled money for years.

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To have achieved a billion dollars in losses, Trump would have had to lose actual money. And the fact that he continued to live in high style even after such failures means he would have had to either lose someone else’s money or get cash injections from another source.

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Yet even those deductions aren’t enough to explain Trump’s losses, according to Blattmachr and three other tax attorneys. The losses in the Trump core businesses in the decade through 1994, would have required Trump and his companies to own billions of dollars more in real estate than he did.

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It’s much more likely that the failure of Trump’s companies in the 1980s and 1990s generated hundreds of millions in losses, said Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. As the businesses failed, their losses flowed through to Trump’s own returns, and he used them to offset any income he made elsewhere.

Trump also appears to have tried to stretch the tax code to magnify those benefits even more, Rosenthal said. “Was Trump worse off after a decade of red? Not really because it was other people’s money,” Rosenthal said.