DONALD TRUMP'S TAX RECORDS: A TALE OF BUSINESS FAILURES ~Eichenwald/Newsweek
Excerpt from beginning:
It wasn’t just 1995.
Five years of tax information from the 1970s that Donald Trump provided to the New Jersey Department of Law and Public Safety show mismanagement and losses that could have pushed him into personal bankruptcy—but for the largesse of his Dad.
The recent report in The New York Times that a loss of almost $1 billion in 1995 may have allowed Donald Trump to avoid federal income taxes for almost 20 years set off attacks by Democrats and pushbacks by Republicans over his business acumen and ability to identify with Americans who pony up cash to the government every April 1
Given that deducting a loss against income in future tax years is both common and legal, Hillary Clinton and her allies have focused primarily on the almost incomprehensible financial thrashing Trump took in that year: The primary qualification offered by the Republican nominee for why he should be president is because of his success in business, and such a gargantuan flop showed he was a bumbler, not a successful entrepreneur.
But the real estate developer and his supporters have flipped the argument: not only has Trump been open about the catastrophic consequences of his failed foray into the casino business that contributed mightily to the 1995 disaster, but he has written a book about it and even used it as a talking point in the opening scene of his reality television show, The Apprentice. “It wasn’t always so easy,’’ he said on the first episode of the show, broadcast in 2008. “About 13 years ago, I was seriously in trouble. I was billions of dollars in debt. But I fought back, and I won big league.” The point: Trump’s ability to recover from the 1995 financial wipeout showed he could accomplish anything in business, including recovering from a near-crippling setback, because of his skills.
http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-federal-income-tax-records-506713
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