While the obtained records are not the actual tax returns, they are the internal worksheets used by IRS examiners when auditing his tax history. The New York Times' source for the new tax data was also able to provide several years of unpublished IRS transcripts for the president’s father, the builder Fred C. Trump. The numbers for Trump Sr. matched up precisely with Fred Trump’s actual returns, which had been obtained by The Times in an earlier investigation.
In contrast to his father’s stable and profitable empire of rental apartments in Brooklyn and Queens, Donald Trump’s primary sources of income changed year after year, from big stock earnings, to a single year of more than $67.1 million in salary, to a mysterious $52.9 million windfall in interest income. But always, those gains were overwhelmed by huge losses from his casinos and other real estate projects.
The years of 1985-1994 were supposedly Trump's prime years.. In 1985, Trump was still riding high from the completion of his first few projects — the Grand Hyatt Hotel, Trump Tower and another Manhattan apartment building, and one Atlantic City casino. He also owned the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League. For the first time, Forbes’s ranking of the wealthiest Americans listed Donald Trump individually (independent of his father) with an estimated net worth of $600 million that included the real estate empire Fred Trump still owned.
However, the newly-discovered tax numbers show that by 1985, Trump's fortunes were already heading into the dumpster. Trump reported 1985 losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.
In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer. His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years.
Trump was able to lose all that money without facing the usual consequences because most of the debt belonged to others-- the banks and bond investors who had supplied the cash to fuel his acquisitions. And after all these losses, Trump secretly leaned on his father’s wealth to continue living like a winner and to stage a comeback.
Near the end of the ten-year period covered by the tax transcripts, Trump testified before a congressional task force, claiming that the real estate business was in an absolute depression. "I see no sign of any kind of upturn at all. There is no incentive to invest. Everyone is doing badly, everyone.”
Everyone except for Trump's rich daddy. While Donald Trump reported hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for 1990 and 1991, Fred Trump’s returns showed a positive income of $53.9 million, with only one major loss: $15 million invested in his son’s latest apartment project.
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