By Steven J. Harper:
The tax code allows taxpayers to depreciate the cost of a commercial building over its assumed life of 39 years. Each year, one thirty-ninth of the cost gets deducted from income. When you deal in big buildings, even small ownership slices translate into big tax depreciation deductions. It doesn’t matter that most buildings last a lot longer than 39 years. Properly structured, depreciation and other deductions relating to the ownership of commercial property pass through to individual taxpayers. Throw in taxes and other deductions, and the amounts get even larger.
Likewise, if a taxpayer loses money on a business venture — and Trump has ample experience there as well — those losses also offset current income. If total deductions and losses in a year exceed income, they carry-forward to offset income in future years.
“He’s going to pay the smallest amount of taxes possible,” Lewandowski said in reframing the entire issue. “Every deduction possible. He fights for every single dollar. That’s the mindset you want to bring to the government.”
Don’t be surprised if Trump’s personal effective tax rate turns out to be surprisingly close to zero. It’s probably a lot lower than what most of his supporters pay. I guess that makes Trump a winner. It makes those supporters something else.
The Full Story (May 25, 2016)
Friday, July 15, 2016
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
New York Magazine: Trump Honors Cinco de Mayo With the Best Tweet of His Storied Career
By Eric Levitz:
Here Trump shifts his focus from the textual to the visual, while retaining — and improving upon — his signature, exclamatory kicker. The shadow draped across his orange face, the stubby thumb pointed skyward, the hovering fork of taco meat, all in their own way serving to express the Donald's final, ecstatic phrase, "I love Hispanics!"
And just when the viewer feels he or she has fully comprehended the meaning of Trump's work, an Easter egg tucked into the corner of the frame reveals whole new layers of hermeneutical possibility.
Here Trump shifts his focus from the textual to the visual, while retaining — and improving upon — his signature, exclamatory kicker. The shadow draped across his orange face, the stubby thumb pointed skyward, the hovering fork of taco meat, all in their own way serving to express the Donald's final, ecstatic phrase, "I love Hispanics!"
And just when the viewer feels he or she has fully comprehended the meaning of Trump's work, an Easter egg tucked into the corner of the frame reveals whole new layers of hermeneutical possibility.
The Full Story (May 5, 2016)Donald Trump is eating a taco salad on top of a bikini-clad photo of his ex-wife, Marla Maples. pic.twitter.com/sW2itGBAOK— Benny (@bennyjohnson) May 5, 2016
Monday, July 11, 2016
Ars Technica: Trump University and the Art of the Get-Rich Seminar
By Joe Mullin and Jonathan Kaminsky:
The booming industry of real estate investment seminar gurus—who by the early 2000s numbered in the dozens—made it clear that you could make big money selling a roomful of people at a time on the dream of easy riches. But seminar work itself was complex, ranging from managing teams of traveling crew members to keeping sales pitches just murky enough that law enforcement wouldn't butt in.
Trump wanted a piece of the action, so he struck a licensing deal with the Milins in 2006. The couple created the “Trump Institute,” using much of the same pitch material and some of the same pitchmen.
The launch of Trump Institute, in turn, paved the way for the later creation of the Trump University live seminar business, which continues to be one of the biggest scandals dogging Trump’s presidential campaign. The New York Attorney General sued Trump, the Trump University, and its president, Michael Sexton, in 2013, alleging that they had ripped off thousands of customers, some of whom paid tens of thousands of dollars for “mentorship” programs.
The Full Article (April 29, 2016)
The booming industry of real estate investment seminar gurus—who by the early 2000s numbered in the dozens—made it clear that you could make big money selling a roomful of people at a time on the dream of easy riches. But seminar work itself was complex, ranging from managing teams of traveling crew members to keeping sales pitches just murky enough that law enforcement wouldn't butt in.
Trump wanted a piece of the action, so he struck a licensing deal with the Milins in 2006. The couple created the “Trump Institute,” using much of the same pitch material and some of the same pitchmen.
The launch of Trump Institute, in turn, paved the way for the later creation of the Trump University live seminar business, which continues to be one of the biggest scandals dogging Trump’s presidential campaign. The New York Attorney General sued Trump, the Trump University, and its president, Michael Sexton, in 2013, alleging that they had ripped off thousands of customers, some of whom paid tens of thousands of dollars for “mentorship” programs.
The Full Article (April 29, 2016)
Friday, July 8, 2016
The Marshall Project: Trump and the Mob
By Tom Robbins:
And then there was the person who had introduced Trump to the FBI agents in the first place. This was a 6-foot-5 bear of a man named Daniel Sullivan, a former Teamsters leader who was serving as what Trump called his "labor consultant" at the time. Sullivan wore other hats as well: He was partners with a reputed Atlantic City mobster named Kenneth Shapiro who controlled the local scrap market and who was in the process of selling Trump a large plot of land at top dollar on which to build his casino.
Sullivan, who had once been close to Jimmy Hoffa, was also secretly operating as an FBI informant, filling in the Bureau on the various mobsters who crossed his path. I know this because Sullivan, who died of a heart attack in 1993, told me all about it, proudly providing copies of the FBI memos as proof. And Sullivan wasn’t just bragging. The FBI agents confirmed to me both the authenticity of the documents and the meetings Sullivan had arranged for them with the budding casino kingpin.
* * *
On paper, the demolition contractor was a union company, as were all of Trump's vendors at the time. But Local 95 of the demolition workers was essentially a subsidiary of the Genovese crime family, and few union rules were enforced. Most of the workers were undocumented immigrants from Poland and they were paid so little and so sporadically that many were forced sleep on the job site. A rank and file union dissident later sued Trump for failing to pay pension and medical benefits required under the union contract. Trump denied knowing about conditions at the work site. Sullivan, who by now had his own gripes with Trump, said otherwise. He testified in the civil suit that he had repeatedly warned the developer about the problems. Trump, in a rush to clear the site, had dismissed his concerns, he said.
Despite Trump's insistence that he never settles lawsuits, he wound up settling that one for an undisclosed sum. Whatever the amount, it seemed to make the union dissident and his attorneys quite satisfied.
The Full Article (April 27, 2016)
And then there was the person who had introduced Trump to the FBI agents in the first place. This was a 6-foot-5 bear of a man named Daniel Sullivan, a former Teamsters leader who was serving as what Trump called his "labor consultant" at the time. Sullivan wore other hats as well: He was partners with a reputed Atlantic City mobster named Kenneth Shapiro who controlled the local scrap market and who was in the process of selling Trump a large plot of land at top dollar on which to build his casino.
Sullivan, who had once been close to Jimmy Hoffa, was also secretly operating as an FBI informant, filling in the Bureau on the various mobsters who crossed his path. I know this because Sullivan, who died of a heart attack in 1993, told me all about it, proudly providing copies of the FBI memos as proof. And Sullivan wasn’t just bragging. The FBI agents confirmed to me both the authenticity of the documents and the meetings Sullivan had arranged for them with the budding casino kingpin.
* * *
On paper, the demolition contractor was a union company, as were all of Trump's vendors at the time. But Local 95 of the demolition workers was essentially a subsidiary of the Genovese crime family, and few union rules were enforced. Most of the workers were undocumented immigrants from Poland and they were paid so little and so sporadically that many were forced sleep on the job site. A rank and file union dissident later sued Trump for failing to pay pension and medical benefits required under the union contract. Trump denied knowing about conditions at the work site. Sullivan, who by now had his own gripes with Trump, said otherwise. He testified in the civil suit that he had repeatedly warned the developer about the problems. Trump, in a rush to clear the site, had dismissed his concerns, he said.
Despite Trump's insistence that he never settles lawsuits, he wound up settling that one for an undisclosed sum. Whatever the amount, it seemed to make the union dissident and his attorneys quite satisfied.
The Full Article (April 27, 2016)
Wednesday, July 6, 2016
The Atlantic: The Many Scandals of Donald Trump
By David A. Graham:
The Four Bankruptcies
Where and when: 1991, 1992, 2004, 2009
The dirt: Four times in his career, Trump’s companies have entered bankruptcy.
The Full Article (April 19, 2016)
The Four Bankruptcies
Where and when: 1991, 1992, 2004, 2009
The dirt: Four times in his career, Trump’s companies have entered bankruptcy.
- In the late 1980s, after insisting that his major qualification to build a new casino in Atlantic City was that he wouldn’t need to use junk bonds, Trump used junk bonds to build Trump Taj Mahal. He built the casino, but couldn’t keep up with interest payments, so his company declared bankruptcy in 1991. He had to sell his yacht, his airline, and half his ownership in the casino.
- A year later, another of Trump’s Atlantic City casinos, the Trump Plaza, went bust after losing more than $550 million. Trump gave up his stake but otherwise insulated himself personally from losses, and managed to keep his CEO title, even though he surrendered any salary or role in day-to-day operations. By the time all was said and done, he had some $900 million in personal debt.
- Trump bounced back over the following decade, but by 2004, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts was $1.8 billion in debt. The company filed for bankruptcy and emerged as Trump Entertainment Resorts. Trump himself was the chairman of the new company, but he no longer had a controlling stake in it.
- Five years later, after the real-estate collapse, Trump Entertainment Resorts once again went bankrupt. Trump resigned from the board, but the company retained his name. In 2014, he successfully sued to take his name off the company and its casinos—one of which had already closed, and the other of which was near closing.
The Full Article (April 19, 2016)
Monday, July 4, 2016
New York Magazine: How the Trump Campaign Actually Works
By Gabriel Sherman:
Six months later, Lewandowski and Hicks worked into the early hours of the morning prepping for Trump’s campaign announcement in the lobby of Trump Tower. “It had to be perfect,” Lewandowski said. “We had to build the stage, make sure the flags hung perfectly; the eagles faced out; the carpet was red, and he would wear a red tie.” And hire plants. The campaign paid actors $50 each to wear Trump T-shirts and wave placards.
Later that morning, they watched from the wings as Ivanka introduced her father in front of reporters and photographers and the manufactured crowd. “It looked like the Academy Awards!” Trump recalled. “You saw the cameras, forget it. You couldn’t get another person in.”
Trump didn’t read a prepared speech, but he knew what he wanted to say, which hardly mattered anyway because hardly anyone took his candidacy seriously at the time. “Nobody said anything,” Trump said about the fact that he had accused Mexico of sending “rapists” over the border into the U.S. “Then two weeks later, they started saying, ‘Wait a minute! Did he really say that?’ ”
He hadn’t tested the line, but Nunberg’s deep dive into talk radio had shown him that this was the sort of thing that would resonate with a certain segment of the Republican base. He also knew that this kind of outrageous statement would earn him the free media attention ($1.9 billion worth and counting, according to the New York Times) that would propel his campaign.
This strategy did not go over well in all corners of the Trump empire. Ivanka, Trump’s 34-year-old daughter, had carefully tended her public image as the softer, more refined face of the Trump empire. Now her father’s hard-edged nativist rhetoric risked damaging not only her brand but her business. A few days after the announcement speech, Ivanka received a terse email from Kimberly Grant, the CEO of ThinkFood Group, the holding company behind celebrity chef José Andrés, whose restaurant was supposed to be the anchor tenant in one of Ivanka’s biggest projects: the $200 million redevelopment of the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C., into a luxury hotel.
“We need to talk. Getting crushed over DJT comments about Latinos and Mexicans,” Grant wrote her, according to legal filings.
Ivanka forwarded Grant’s email to her executives.
“Ugh,” one responded. “This is not surprising and would expect that this will not be the last that we hear of it. At least for formal, prepared speeches, can someone vet going forward? Hopefully the Latino community does not organize against us more broadly in DC / across Trump properties.”
Ivanka’s older brother, Donald Jr., also weighed in. “Yea I was waiting for that one. Let’s discuss in the am.”
Ivanka did her best to salvage the partnership. She asked her father to issue an apology, even submitting several drafts for him to release to the press. But he refused. “Rapists are coming into the country! You know I was right,” Trump later told me.
The Full Article (April 3, 2016)
Six months later, Lewandowski and Hicks worked into the early hours of the morning prepping for Trump’s campaign announcement in the lobby of Trump Tower. “It had to be perfect,” Lewandowski said. “We had to build the stage, make sure the flags hung perfectly; the eagles faced out; the carpet was red, and he would wear a red tie.” And hire plants. The campaign paid actors $50 each to wear Trump T-shirts and wave placards.
Later that morning, they watched from the wings as Ivanka introduced her father in front of reporters and photographers and the manufactured crowd. “It looked like the Academy Awards!” Trump recalled. “You saw the cameras, forget it. You couldn’t get another person in.”
Trump didn’t read a prepared speech, but he knew what he wanted to say, which hardly mattered anyway because hardly anyone took his candidacy seriously at the time. “Nobody said anything,” Trump said about the fact that he had accused Mexico of sending “rapists” over the border into the U.S. “Then two weeks later, they started saying, ‘Wait a minute! Did he really say that?’ ”
He hadn’t tested the line, but Nunberg’s deep dive into talk radio had shown him that this was the sort of thing that would resonate with a certain segment of the Republican base. He also knew that this kind of outrageous statement would earn him the free media attention ($1.9 billion worth and counting, according to the New York Times) that would propel his campaign.
This strategy did not go over well in all corners of the Trump empire. Ivanka, Trump’s 34-year-old daughter, had carefully tended her public image as the softer, more refined face of the Trump empire. Now her father’s hard-edged nativist rhetoric risked damaging not only her brand but her business. A few days after the announcement speech, Ivanka received a terse email from Kimberly Grant, the CEO of ThinkFood Group, the holding company behind celebrity chef José Andrés, whose restaurant was supposed to be the anchor tenant in one of Ivanka’s biggest projects: the $200 million redevelopment of the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C., into a luxury hotel.
“We need to talk. Getting crushed over DJT comments about Latinos and Mexicans,” Grant wrote her, according to legal filings.
Ivanka forwarded Grant’s email to her executives.
“Ugh,” one responded. “This is not surprising and would expect that this will not be the last that we hear of it. At least for formal, prepared speeches, can someone vet going forward? Hopefully the Latino community does not organize against us more broadly in DC / across Trump properties.”
Ivanka’s older brother, Donald Jr., also weighed in. “Yea I was waiting for that one. Let’s discuss in the am.”
Ivanka did her best to salvage the partnership. She asked her father to issue an apology, even submitting several drafts for him to release to the press. But he refused. “Rapists are coming into the country! You know I was right,” Trump later told me.
The Full Article (April 3, 2016)
Friday, July 1, 2016
Slate: Donald Trump Hates Women
By Franklin Foer
Trump considers himself such a virile example of masculinity that he’s qualified to serve as the ultimate arbiter of femininity. He relishes judging women on the basis of their looks, which he seems to believe amounts to the sum of their character. Walking out of his meeting with the Washington Post editorial board this week, he paused to pronounce editor Karen Attiah “beautiful.” When he owned the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, he would screen all the contestants. His nominal reason for taking on this role was to make sure that his lackeys weren’t neglecting any beauties. His real motive was to humiliate the women. He would ask a contestant to name which of her competitors she found “hot.” If he didn’t consider a woman up to his standards, he would direct her to stand with her fellow “discards.” One of the contestants, Carrie Prejean, wrote about this in her book, Still Standing: “Some of the girls were sobbing backstage after [Trump] left, devastated to have failed even before the competition really began ... even those of us who were among the chosen couldn’t feel very good about it—it was as though we had been stripped bare.”
Humiliating women by decrying their ugliness is an almost recreational pastime for Trump. When the New York Times columnist Gail Collins described him as a “financially embittered thousandaire,” he sent her a copy of the column with her picture circled. “The Face of a Dog!” he scrawled over her visage. This is the tack he took with Carly Fiorina, when he described her facial appearance as essentially disqualifying her from the presidency. It’s the method he’s used to denounce Cher, Bette Midler, Angelina Jolie, and Rosie O’Donnell—“fat ass,” “slob, “extremely unattractive,” etc.—when they had the temerity to criticize him. The joy he takes in humiliating women is not something he even bothers to disguise. He told the journalist Timothy L. O’Brien, “My favorite part [of the movie Pulp Fiction] is when Sam has his gun out in the diner and he tells the guy to tell his girlfriend to shut up. Tell that bitch to be cool. Say: ‘Bitch be cool.’ I love those lines.” Or as he elegantly summed up his view to New York magazine in the early ’90s, “Women, you have to treat them like shit.”
The Full Article (March 24, 2016)
Trump considers himself such a virile example of masculinity that he’s qualified to serve as the ultimate arbiter of femininity. He relishes judging women on the basis of their looks, which he seems to believe amounts to the sum of their character. Walking out of his meeting with the Washington Post editorial board this week, he paused to pronounce editor Karen Attiah “beautiful.” When he owned the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, he would screen all the contestants. His nominal reason for taking on this role was to make sure that his lackeys weren’t neglecting any beauties. His real motive was to humiliate the women. He would ask a contestant to name which of her competitors she found “hot.” If he didn’t consider a woman up to his standards, he would direct her to stand with her fellow “discards.” One of the contestants, Carrie Prejean, wrote about this in her book, Still Standing: “Some of the girls were sobbing backstage after [Trump] left, devastated to have failed even before the competition really began ... even those of us who were among the chosen couldn’t feel very good about it—it was as though we had been stripped bare.”
Humiliating women by decrying their ugliness is an almost recreational pastime for Trump. When the New York Times columnist Gail Collins described him as a “financially embittered thousandaire,” he sent her a copy of the column with her picture circled. “The Face of a Dog!” he scrawled over her visage. This is the tack he took with Carly Fiorina, when he described her facial appearance as essentially disqualifying her from the presidency. It’s the method he’s used to denounce Cher, Bette Midler, Angelina Jolie, and Rosie O’Donnell—“fat ass,” “slob, “extremely unattractive,” etc.—when they had the temerity to criticize him. The joy he takes in humiliating women is not something he even bothers to disguise. He told the journalist Timothy L. O’Brien, “My favorite part [of the movie Pulp Fiction] is when Sam has his gun out in the diner and he tells the guy to tell his girlfriend to shut up. Tell that bitch to be cool. Say: ‘Bitch be cool.’ I love those lines.” Or as he elegantly summed up his view to New York magazine in the early ’90s, “Women, you have to treat them like shit.”
The Full Article (March 24, 2016)
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