Report Reveals Trump Avoided Paying Taxes On Nearly $300 Million In Loans

Another bombshell published by The New York Times on Tuesday revealed that Donald Trump avoided paying taxes on nearly $300 million in loans he received.

According to the report, “The president’s federal income tax records, obtained by The New York Times, show for the first time that, since 2010, his lenders have forgiven about $287 million in debt that he failed to repay. The vast majority was related to the Chicago project.”

As Forbes pointed out on Tuesday, those loans “would normally count as taxable income,” but Trump largely avoided paying taxes on it.

More from the report:

How Mr. Trump found trouble in Chicago, and maneuvered his way out of it, is a case study in doing business the Trump way.

When the project encountered problems, he tried to walk away from his huge debts. For most individuals or businesses, that would have been a recipe for ruin. But tax-return data, other records and interviews show that rather than warring with a notoriously litigious and headline-seeking client, lenders cut Mr. Trump slack — exactly what he seemed to have been counting on.

Big banks and hedge funds gave him years of extra time to repay his debts. Even after Mr. Trump sued his largest lender, accusing it of preying on him, the bank agreed to lend him another $99 million — more than twice as much as was previously known — so that he could pay back what he still owed the bank on the defaulted Chicago loan, records show.

Ultimately, Mr. Trump’s lenders forgave much of what he owed.

Those forgiven debts are now part of a broader investigation of Mr. Trump’s business by the New York attorney general. They normally would have generated a big tax bill, since the Internal Revenue Service treats canceled debts as income. Yet as has often happened in his long career, Mr. Trump appears to have paid almost no federal income tax on that money, in part because of large losses in his other businesses, The Times’s analysis of his tax records found.

Trump is a failed businessman and a tax fraud

This latest report from the New York Times is part of an ongoing investigation by the newspaper into Donald Trump’s finances.

One recent report showed that Trump may have committed federal tax fraud related to so-called “charitable donations.”

Last week, The Times reported that Trump has a secret Chinese bank account and that he has paid more taxes in China than the United States.

All of this comes after The New York Times initially revealed that this president pays next to nothing in taxes.

Donald Trump built his initial presidential candidacy on the premise that he was a smart, successful businessman who could use his skills to run the federal government.

We now know that – like everything else related to Trump – this was a con.

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Sean Colarossi

Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.

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