Accidentally or purposely drowned out by the furor around Trump's grotesque one man show last night is the fact that the NY Times pulled back the curtain on Trump's financial world and found the rotting corpse of Fred Trump still holding the purse strings. The whole 40-page expose is available online, but here's a the
11 main takaways.
Bottom line: Trump is a crook and a fraud.
[For ease of reference, when I refer to "Trump", I mean Donald Trump. All other Trumps (because they're all in it up to their shifty eyeballs) will be identified by their first name or suffix.]
His whole persona of a successful businessman is more of a sham than even his most ardent critics (i.e. me) could've imagined. Trump claimed only to have received a "small" loan of $1 million from his father, which he quickly repaid. The reality is that Fred Trump started paying his son a salary at age 3, and he was already a millionaire - in gifted money - by age 8. Throughout his life and continuing to this day, Trump received money from his father. The total, in today's valuation, of the funds given to Trump by his father is in excess of $400 million.
Much, if not all, of this wealth transfer was done using methods to evade paying the appropriate taxes. At his death, Fred Trump's estate was valued - for estate tax purposes - at $40 million, but that entire portfolio of properties was valued, a mere 5 years later, at $900 million.
Trump's brother Robert has corroborated some of the Times reporting regarding the estate tax avoidance schemes. Further, Trump's sister - Maryanne - also benefited from this tax fraud, and she's currently a sitting federal judge.
The main vehicle to milk Fred Trump's empire of wealth and distribute it to his spawn was a fake company set up to procure all equipment and services required to maintenance Fred Trump's real estate holdings, including rent controlled housing projects. The company had no office and no employees. All services rendered to Fred Trump's properties passed through this shell company, the cost of such services being massively inflated so that the residual cash sat in the shell company and passed to the owners - Fred's kids - as profit.
In a disgusting two-fer, Fred used the inflated invoices from the shell company to get permission to raise the rents on his rent-controlled tenants.
Trump's entire real estate business was bankrolled and bailed out repeatedly by his father. Tens of millions of dollars in loans were given; many were never repaid, further evading taxes. The evaded tax bill is estimated to be in excess of $500 million. That's half a billion dollars in Trump's pocket that should have been in ours. Moreover, his entire persona on which he traded through the years and on which he campaigned for president is a complete fraud.
Trump has spent his entire life cashing daddy's checks, and now he's in charge of the world's largest economy. Coincidentally, his administration is spending money like a drunk sailor on the first night of shore leave, and the debt is piling up to the tune of $1 trillion a year. A YEAR!
Trump's response to the report is an extended "fake news" rant as expected. Many of the crimes document by the Times have passed their statute of limitations, but many haven't. New York state regulators have already announced that it is taking up the report and will go after any and all prosecutable crimes.