The Bottom Line on Trump’s Taxes
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 30 September 2020
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Donald Trump has spent the last four years refusing to release his tax returns. When the New York Times published 20 years worth of them, it revealed a possible reason why. The president’s balance sheet listed huge losses, which he used to dramatically cut down what he owed in taxes.
Were these the dealings of a savvy businessman, or an unscrupulous swindler? And what does it mean for the election to have a candidate who still has a stake in their business and an alarming amount of debt?
Guest: Andrea Bernstein, co-host of the Trump, Inc. podcast and the author of “American Oligarchs: the Kushners, the Trumps and the Marriage of Money and Power.”
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Podcast production by Mary Wilson, Jayson De Leon, Danielle Hewitt, and Elena Schwartz.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | On Sunday night, when the New York Times dropped their epic report on two decades of Donald Trump's tax returns, I saw this tweet start making the rounds. |
| 0:13.3 | We go live now to the offices of the Trump Inc. podcast, it read. And then it attaches this gif of SpongeBob, screaming, while paper flies all around him. |
| 0:24.9 | Is that what your yesterday was like? |
| 0:28.9 | I actually feel like the last three years and eight months have been like that. |
| 0:34.6 | Andrea Bernstein co-hosts the Trump Bank podcast. She works with ProPublica and WNYC to decode the Trump family's financial records. |
| 0:43.1 | It's like this constant incoming and masses of paper and more and more and more documents |
| 0:49.1 | and we're like throwing them up in the air and we're reading them. |
| 0:52.2 | And it really did describe the atmosphere of |
| 0:55.6 | just being under this constant blizzard of documents, some of which are revelatory and all of |
| 1:03.5 | which require a large amount of attention. I don't think you have to be a reporter to feel like |
| 1:09.3 | you're drowning in paperwork like this. |
| 1:11.6 | There's plenty of damning information about the Trump family going around. |
| 1:15.1 | There are tell-all books, the nearly 500-page Mueller report, |
| 1:19.8 | and now this reporting in the New York Times, |
| 1:23.4 | which meticulously builds a narrative of the Trump family's real estate empire over the last 20 years. |
| 1:29.4 | What emerges from this work is a financial roller coaster. |
| 1:33.5 | Fat years, when the family's fortunes seemed to surge, |
| 1:37.1 | followed by fallow years when losses dominated the balance sheet. |
| 1:42.0 | And as the president entered the Oval Office in 2017, he seemed to be |
| 1:45.9 | in the middle of a fallow period, which meant he was paying almost nothing in federal income tax. |
| 1:52.2 | Their lead, of course, was that he paid $750 one year and he paid $750 the next year and out of... |
| 1:58.9 | And the decade before that, nada. |
... |
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