President Donald Trump’s White House has responded to a bombshell New York Times report that reviewed over 100,000 documents to conclude that Trump’s father, Fred, transferred to him hundreds of millions of dollars and skirted tax payments.
But the White House’s response weirdly omits to specifically counter the total destruction of Trump’s origin story.
On the campaign trail in 2015, Trump portrayed himself as a self-made billionaire with a knack for the real estate market.
“It has not been easy for me. I started off in Brooklyn. My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars. I came into Manhattan, and I had to pay him back, and I had to pay him back with interest. But I came into Manhattan and I started buying properties, and I did great,” said Trump.
The New York Times, however, reported on a “trove of confidential tax returns and financial records” showing that Trump received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from when he was a child through the present day.
From the Times:
“The president’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate then imposed on gifts and inheritances.
“The Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax records show.”
But the White House, instead of outright denying the hundreds of millions Trump got from his father, seemed to confirm the transactions that enriched Trump.
Though the White House called the article a “misleading attack against the Trump family by the failing New York Times,” it took the existence of the transactions reported by the paper for granted. “Many decades ago the IRS reviewed and signed off on these transactions,” the White House statement reads.
While it remains unclear which transactions described in the 14,000-word article the White House is talking about here, the statement only addresses the family’s financial history in this one brief sentence.
Robert Trump, the president’s brother, told the New York Times that: “All appropriate gift and estate tax returns were filed, and the required taxes were paid. Our father’s estate was closed in 2001 by both the Internal Revenue Service and the New York State tax authorities, and our mother’s estate was closed in 2004.”
But the settling of the Trump’s parents’ estates didn’t happen “many decades ago.”
The rest of the statement slams the Times and the media at large for not casting Trump’s accomplishments in office in a positive light. The White House dedicates fully three quarters of its statement to trashing the Times, but it appears to imply that the documents reviewed by the Times reflect reality.
In conclusion, Trump may have exaggerated his personal wealth or success on the campaign trail.
Here’s the White House’s full statement:
“Fred Trump has been gone for nearly twenty years and it’s sad to witness this misleading attack against the Trump family by the failing New York Times. Many decades ago the IRS reviewed and signed off on these transactions. The New York Times’ and other media outlets’ credibility with the American people is at an all time low because they are consumed with attacking the president and his family 24/7 instead of reporting the news. The truth is the market is at an all-time high, unemployment is at a fifty year low, taxes for families and businesses have been cut, wages are up, farmers and workers are empowered from better trade deals, and America’s military is stronger than ever, yet the New York Times can rarely find anything positive about the President and his tremendous record of success to report. Perhaps another apology from the New York Times, like the one they had to issue after they got the 2016 election so embarrassingly wrong, is in order.”
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