Trump biographer: Bombshell NYT report on Trump's taxes shows he's an even bigger fraud than I imagined
Trump biographer Tim O'Brien has for years called BS on the president's claims of vast wealth -- but even he's surprised at the scope of the fraud revealed by the New York Times' bombshell reporting.
Writing at Bloomberg, O'Brien says that he uncovered some of what the Times did during his own reporting on Trump's finances last decade.
"The Times’s reporting indicates that Fred ultimately loaned Donald about $60.7 million, significantly more than I had reported," he writes.
O'Brien says the report is particularly damning because it shows that Trump would not be anything without the maneuverings of his father, Fred Trump, who not only made the family's fortune but also worked obsessively to conceal its scope from the government.
"Fred set up a shell company called All County Building Supply & Maintenance to ostensibly purchase equipment, appliances and supplies for Trump-owned properties," he notes. "But the Trumps just marked up the cost of purchases the company already made and channeled the excess money – unreported and thus untaxed as gifts – to Fred’s children and one of their cousins."
And, O'Brien explains, this wasn't just a one-time scam.
"The All County hi-jinks weren’t the first time Fred had padded expenses to cheat the government," he says. "In 1954, he was called before the Senate to testify about how he overcharged the federal government millions of dollars by inflating costs associated with a taxpayer-subsidized housing development in Brooklyn."
The bottom line, says O'Brien, is that Trump's mythology of being a "self-made" billionaire is absolutely false -- the only thing that's left to debate is the scope of the fraud.
"Fred’s mythologizing would be something Trump would later adopt in his adult years, allowing him to say that his wealth and his standing in the world had nothing to do with his father – even when they had everything to do with his father," he writes.
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