If you believe that then you never even read any of the Times piece which, among other things, complains that the valuation of various properties was actually higher than reported. That's the very definition of an opinion.
Yeah, it's a
bit more than that.
Emblematic of their audacity was Park Briar, a 150-unit building in Queens. As it happened, 18 days before Fred Trump Jr.’s death, the Trump siblings had submitted Park Briar’s co-op conversion plan, stating under oath that the building was worth $17.1 million. Yet as Fred Trump Jr.’s executors, Donald Trump and his father claimed on the tax return that Park Briar was worth $2.9 million when Fred Trump Jr. died.
Yep, that's right: According to the exact same people, the valuation of the building magically dropped 86% in just 18 days. With, of course, no changes whatsoever to the building. The only thing that changed was who the Trumps were talking to.
There were also the millions in loans to Donald, that were never repaid, and never properly classified as forgiven, in violation of tax laws:
By 1987, for example, Donald Trump’s loan debt to his father had grown to at least $11 million. Yet canceling the debt would have required Donald Trump to pay millions in taxes on the amount forgiven. Father and son found another solution, one never before disclosed, that appears to constitute both an unreported multimillion-dollar gift and a potentially illegal tax write-off.
In December 1987, records show, Fred Trump bought a 7.5 percent stake in Trump Palace, a 55-story condominium building his son was erecting on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Most, if not all, of his investment, which totaled $15.5 million, was made by exchanging his son’s unpaid debts for Trump Palace shares, records show.
Four years later, in December 1991, Fred Trump sold his entire stake in Trump Palace for just $10,000, his tax returns and financial statements reveal. Those documents do not identify who bought his stake. But other records indicate that he sold it back to his son.
Are you sure you read the right article...?
I understand that a lot of people figure "tax returns are fact". They tend to think of it as "I reported my W-2, my bank interest and my mortgage. Those numbers are all facts because I have the paperwork to prove them".
Yeah, that's not what they did, and it's not how the tax system is supposed to work.
The issue isn't about alleged complexities. It's not about the differences between individual or corporate partnerships. This is not about possible ambiguities over a $500 clothing donation. It's that they repeatedly and deliberately undervalued their properties, failed to properly handle unpaid loans, and used a variety of other methods, to avoid paying gift taxes while transferring money and property from Fred to his children (mostly Donald). The result was that the beneficiaries of Fred Trump's estate evaded tens of millions of taxes, in a way that was very likely riddled with fraud.
Aside from any potential fraud, the article describes some of the ways that Fred repeatedly bailed out Donald's failures. Only one of these was well-known before today -- Fred bought $3.5 million in chips from a casino that Donald drove into the ground, and never used them; that was an illegal loan. We didn't know that Fred had pulled nearly $50 million out of his businesses (something he never did, he was very frugal) to cover Donald's mistakes.
We've known for a long time that Donald's claims that he is a "self-made man" were lies, though we didn't know the full extent of it. We probably still don't know it all, as the article's authors spent
years accumulating documents and interviewing people, and said there was no end to what they were finding.
