When Donald J. Trump was building casinos in Atlantic City
in the 1990s, he spoke of his dream of bringing jobs and development to
the hard-luck community. In the end, after all the bankruptcies,
layoffs and stiffed contractors, it was Mr. Trump who walked away with
tens of millions of dollars in management fees and huge tax deductions
that may have helped him avoid paying personal income taxes for nearly two decades.
When Mr. Trump announced the founding of Trump University
in 2005, he described it as a way to share his real estate secrets with
ordinary investors. “If I had a choice of making lots of money or
imparting lots of knowledge,” he said, “I think I’d be as happy to
impart knowledge as to make money.” In the end, after the university was
shut down amid investigations and allegations of fraud, it was Mr. Trump who again walked away with millions in fees.
Today
Mr. Trump is making his most selfless pledge of all, promising that if
elected president he will walk away from his beloved business empire so
he can devote himself entirely to the American people. “If I become
president, I couldn’t care less about my company,” he said at one
debate. “It’s peanuts.”
With
the presidential campaign in the homestretch, Hillary Clinton is now
taking dead aim at Mr. Trump’s professed altruistic purpose. She and her
supporters are suggesting that Mr. Trump regards the White House as one
more moneymaking venture, the most lucrative opportunity of all to
advance his family fortune.
Graphic
How Donald Trump Avoided Paying Taxes Using Other People’s Money
Mr. Trump managed to save millions in personal taxes by
borrowing – then losing – other people’s money.
“Imagine
having a president who owes hundreds of millions of dollars to foreign
banks and other foreign entities that he doesn’t tell us about,” Mrs.
Clinton said at a rally in Pittsburgh on Friday. “Ask yourself: So if
he’s sitting across the table negotiating with people from those
countries, is he going to put his own financial interests ahead of
America’s interests?”
At
the same rally, one of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters, Mark Cuban, the
billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, put it even more bluntly:
“There’s going to come a time, if Donald Trump, God help us, was
president, where a Putin or an Assad would say to him, ‘Donald, if you
do this, I’ll give you $20 billion,’” Mr. Cuban said, referring to
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Bashar al-Assad of
Syria.
“Do you think he’s going to do what’s right for the country? Or do you think he is going to take the money?”
For more than a year now, reporters from The New York Times have been scouring Mr. Trump’s business record, exploring the cycles of boom and bust, the spectacular reinventions, the shady business partners, the audacious tax avoidance maneuvers and the persistent deceptions that have been the leitmotif of his five decades of deal making.
That
review reveals plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Mr. Trump’s
oft-stated promise to direct every ounce of his business acumen and
negotiating prowess in service of the American people. But the same
review also reveals patterns of behavior and qualities of leadership
that could indeed help Mr. Trump fulfill his now-familiar sales pitch to
voters: “If we could run our country the way I’ve run my company, we
would have a country that you would be so proud of.”
Mr.
Trump, for example, has won millions of supporters by promising to
renegotiate, abrogate or ignore any number of written commitments made
by past American presidents, like trade deals, climate change pacts, even the Geneva Conventions.
If there is one recurring theme in the litigation spawned by Mr.
Trump’s business ventures, it is his brazen willingness to ignore the
plain terms of contracts he finds inconvenient while relentlessly
enforcing contract terms he finds useful.
Another
recurring theme — one that might come in handy given the inherent
unpredictability of the White House — is Mr. Trump’s strategic
flexibility.
When
either his ambitions or circumstances shift, Mr. Trump has shown
himself willing to make swift and dramatic course corrections in his
businesses. From the moment Mr. Trump took the reins of the real estate
business his father founded, he was bent on reinvention, steering its
focus away from mostly middle-class apartment projects in the other
boroughs to big, splashy commercial developments in Manhattan. It is a
formula Mr. Trump has returned to time and again as he has cycled
through different money making personas.
His foray into reality television
with “The Apprentice” was the biggest and most successful detour, a
decision that came to look prescient with the collapse of the real
estate market and recession in the late 2000s. Then, sensing opportunity
in the public’s economic anxiety, Mr. Trump remade himself yet again,
this time as a sort of walking infomercial for get-rich-quick schemes.
He peddled Trump University, a real estate sales seminar, and a
multilevel vitamin marketing business called Trump Network as ways for
average people to make money during difficult times.
Mr. Trump, who has pledged major spending to rebuild crumbling roads, bridges and airports,
also has a track record, albeit with significant blemishes, of
completing complex and politically fraught construction projects on time
and under budget, most famously in the 1980s when, in a matter of
months, Mr. Trump refurbished Wollman Rink
in Central Park, a project the City of New York had notoriously failed
to complete after years of budget overruns and false starts. Likewise,
last month when he attended the grand opening of his latest Trump
International Hotel, just blocks from the White House, Mr. Trump boasted
that the hotel was completed under budget and ahead of schedule.
Document: Pages From Donald Trump’s 1995 Income Tax Records
“In
my whole life, I’ve gotten things done,” Mr. Trump said in an interview
with The Times in May. “Whether it’s getting a city built on the West
Side of Manhattan or getting zoning board approvals, my whole life has
been finding a consensus.”
Any assessment of how Mr. Trump might use the White House to advance his financial interests is impaired by his unwillingness to release his tax returns,
even in summary form, breaking with four decades of tradition followed
by both Democratic and Republican candidates. His tax returns, for
example, would reveal far more information about the nature of and
financing behind his partnerships, which number in the hundreds.
An investigation by The Times this summer into Mr. Trump’s maze of real estate holdings
in the United States found that Mr. Trump’s companies owed at least
$650 million, or twice the amount that could be gleaned from the
financial disclosure reports Mr. Trump submitted to run for the
presidency. Separately, partnerships in which he has a significant
interest have loans from the Bank of China and Goldman Sachs, two
powerful financial institutions his administration could expect to
encounter.
Further
complicating matters is his plan to have his children continue running
his business empire should he occupy the Oval Office. “I would probably
have my children run it with my executives, and I wouldn’t ever be
involved because I wouldn’t care about anything but our country,” Mr.
Trump said at a debate in January.
The
potential for conflicts of interest are all the more glaring given the
prominent role his children have played in his political operation, both
as surrogates and advisers.
“We
are not going to be involved in government,” Donald Trump Jr. said
during an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. Mr. Stephanopoulos
asked how conflicts could be avoided given that Mr. Trump was aware of
all his business interests. “We’re not going to discuss those things,”
his son replied. “It doesn’t matter. Trust me.”
Regardless of how carefully the Trumps police potential conflicts of interest, critics have been quick to note that Mr. Trump’s tax proposals
alone would clearly benefit his business empire, not to mention the
estate his children could expect to inherit on his death. Less clear is
how Mr. Trump’s oversight of the Internal Revenue Service might impact
an agency that has had Mr. Trump or his partnerships under nearly
constant audit for more than two decades.
Then
there are all the times Mr. Trump has used his business empire as a
backdrop during his campaign — at times combining campaign statements
with naked promotions for his properties, be it Trump Tower, where he first announced his campaign, or his golf courses in Scotland, where he took his press pool on a hole-by-hole tour,
or, most notoriously, when he summoned reporters to his new Washington
hotel to show off its gleaming marble amenities while, after stoking
doubts for years, he admitted in one terse sentence that “President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period.”
Mr. Trump has given no indication that as president he would curb his compulsion to constantly promote the Trump brand, which, according to Mr. Trump’s own assessment of his total net worth, is now his single most valuable asset.
In
June, Mr. Trump posted a message on Twitter that suggested how
difficult this may be for him. Mr. Trump said that he had “instructed my
execs” to reopen Trump University if he is elected president. “So much
interest in it!”
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