By TATIANA PROPHET

Well, The New York Times finally got its Trump tax bombshell — ten years of ‘tax transcripts’ and boy, does it make him look like a loser.

There’s just a small detail: developers in New York City and around the country suffered tremendous losses right in the middle of the relevant time period. But there’s no context to The Times’ report; it focuses squarely on Donald Trump. And what a loser he is. This is not to suggest that Trump made great decisions through that decade; but in his testimony to Congress in November 1991, he discusses making decisions based on one set of rules, and then with the tax cut of 1986, the wealthy whose taxes were slashed had no incentive to invest in real estate, he told the panel (see video below).

The years in question coincided with a major oversupply of commercial real estate, high vacancy, high delinquency in real estate loans and a lack of incentive for investors to put their money in commercial real estate (see testimony in video below).

Judging from the fact that they include his father’s tax info as well - and it sounds like the leaker was a longtime insider — Michael Cohen maybe?

One fact buried deep in is that real estate developers use depreciation to take annual losses and thereby shelter taxable income. It’s not a huge amount, but certainly a factor. Another important factor might have been an examination of the general situation in the real estate market in which Trump and others found himself.

Points: this article shows partial facts. Here are some more: In 2015 Trump filed a financial disclosure form with the Federal Election Commission showing assets, liabilities and revenue for The Trump Organization, one of the largest private companies in the United States. Assets are somewhere in the neighborhood of $2-4 billion - but you’d never know it from this Times masterpiece.

An article on that 2015 disclosure (which contains a link to the 94-page FEC filing) can be found here:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33644498