By John Cassidy
OCTOBER 2, 2016
The current incarnation of Rudy Giuliani lacks many qualities associated with him when he was mayor of New York City: moderation, tolerance, and an eagerness to cross party lines. But as he showed Sunday morning on “Meet the Press,” where he appeared in his role as a Donald Trump surrogate, he can’t be accused of lacking chutzpah, or what the Brits call a brass neck.
“The reality is, he’s a genius,” Giuliani said when the show’s host, Chuck Todd, asked him about the New York Times’s revelation that Trump, back in 1995, reported more than nine hundred million dollars in losses on his tax returns, which might well have shielded him from federal income taxes for years. “He did something we admire in America: he came back.” Far from being regarded as a tax avoider, Giuliani insisted, Trump was to be compared to Steve Jobs and Winston Churchill, both of whom suffered setbacks only to return in triumph. “Great men have big failures and then they take those failures, and they turn them into great results,” he said.
The Times’s story, published Saturday, was based upon portions of Trump’s state tax returns for 1995, which someone mailed to the paper. That year, the returns showed, Trump declared that his “federal adjusted gross income”—that means his income adjusted for business losses and other deductions—was minus $915,729,293.
Thanks to various official filings and the efforts of a number of news organizations, it had already been documented that Trump didn’t pay any income tax in 1978, 1979, 1992, and 1994. Given the new revelation of the huge losses he declared in 1995, all of which could be offset against his taxable income, it is entirely reasonable to presume that he didn’t pay any income taxes for many years that followed. Indeed, it is entirely conceivable that Trump hasn’t paid any income taxes at all for more than two decades—a possibility that Hillary Clinton raised in last week’s Presidential debate, and which various journalists, myself included, have been speculating about.
Rather than seeking to dispel the impression that Trump hasn’t paid a cent of income tax, Giuliani on Sunday sought to highlight the fact that Trump’s businesses had paid other types of taxes, such as payroll taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes. This is now the official Trump line. A few nights ago, I appeared on CNN with one of Trump’s economic advisers, Howard Lorber, and he made the same argument. So did the Trump campaign itself, in a statement issued to the Times. “Mr. Trump is a highly-skilled businessman who has a fiduciary responsibility to his business, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required,” the statement said. “That being said, Mr. Trump has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes, sales and excise taxes, real estate taxes, city taxes, state taxes, employee taxes and federal taxes.”
This is a diversionary argument, of course. Virtually all businesses pay taxes, and those taxes have nothing to do with the personal tax liabilities of their founders and top executives. Should Bill Gates pay no income tax because Microsoft employs more than a hundred thousand people and pays part of their payroll taxes? Should Warren Buffett pay no income tax because his holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, has businesses all over America that pay local taxes? Should Oracle chairman Larry Ellison pay no income taxes because the property taxes on his estate in Woodside, California, are reportedly eight hundred thousand dollars a year?
Trump’s personal tax affairs stand on their own, and he’ll have to defend them as such. As he has repeatedly said that he gets audited virtually every year, we can probably assume that the I.R.S. has looked into the huge losses he claimed to have racked up in 1995 and found them to be genuine. That wouldn’t be surprising. During the early nineteen-nineties, as the Times article reminded us on Saturday, many of Trump’s businesses “were hemorrhaging money. . . . The Trump Taj Mahal casino reported a $25.5 million net loss during its first six months of 1990; the Trump’s Castle casino lost $43.5 million for the year. His airline, Trump Shuttle, lost $34.5 million during just the first six months of that year.”
None of this is to say that Trump broke any laws. The scandal, instead, is what he was able to do lawfully thanks to the structure of the tax code, and his subsequent failure to be transparent about it. If a source hadn’t sent the 1995 tax documents to the Times, Trump would almost certainly have continued to refuse to release his tax returns, and stuck to the fiction that even if he did release them, they wouldn’t tell us much anyway.
Even now, he might seek to brazen it out. But his campaign is also trying out the “genius” line, to see if it gets any traction. If it does—if Trump’s supporters react to the new revelations with admiration rather than outrage—Trump might well go ahead and release at least some of his tax returns. That is what some of his associates have been advising him to do for weeks.
The problem with this strategy should be obvious. Far from demonstrating that Trump is a “genius” or a “highly-skilled businessman,” the 1995 returns confirm what longtime observers have known for years: earlier in his career, at least, Trump was a terrible businessman. He borrowed billions of dollars to build casinos and buy overpriced trophy properties, such as the Plaza Hotel and the Eastern Air Lines Shuttle. His businesses lost almost all of this money, and some of the biggest ones, including the Plaza, were forced to seek bankruptcy protection. Trump personally was only saved from the humiliation of being declared bust by the fact that his bankers believed they would get more of their money back by throwing him a lifeline.
That’s what they did, and Trump slowly rehabilitated himself. But his comeback was due less to any innate entrepreneurial talent than to a recovery in the property market and his ability to sell himself as a success story despite his financial problems. Indeed, Trump’s real skill has always been as a self-promoter and flimflam man rather than as a creator of successful companies. To compare him to Steve Jobs is a joke, and to compare him to Churchill is perhaps the topper.
Long before he became Prime Minister, the young Churchill was a key proponent of the “People’s Budget” of 1909, in which the great liberal politician David Lloyd George, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, introduced unprecedented levies on the wealthy into Britain’s tax code. Conservative contemporaries dubbed Lloyd George and Churchill, whom they regarded as dangerous radicals, the “Terrible Twins.”
Trump claims to be a populist and man of the people, but the claim is getting hollower by the day. In the course of his business career, he has stiffed suppliers, reneged on debts, operated a sham university that charged people of moderate means tens of thousands of dollars, given away little or nothing to charity, and—now we know this all but for sure—exploited loopholes in the tax code to get out of paying any income taxes. Yes, it takes a certain kind of talent to get as far as Trump has with that sort of record. But it certainly isn’t the genius that Giuliani was referring to.
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