Donald Trump’s newly unearthed tax return transcripts from 1984 to 1995 reveal that he lost more than a billion dollars during that decade, thanks to the ineptitude of nearly all of his business ventures. But the documents also point to something else, and perhaps something more sinister.
The New York Times, which published the tax return transcripts, noted that Donald Trump reported $52 million in income from interest. This is quite a small amount of money compared to the billion dollars in losses he racked up during that time. But interest always comes from somewhere, and there is nothing anywhere in this decade of records that points to anything that could have produced that kind of interest. This points to Trump having had some kind massive hidden bank account that he was keeping hidden from his tax returns, and he screwed up by reporting the interest from that account.
Just how much hidden money are we talking about? That depends on the interest rate he was getting. For instance, if Trump was making a 5% annual interest rate on that bank account, and that netted $52.9 million in interest in one year, that would mean the account had just over a billion dollars in it. If Trump was making an annual interest rate of 2%, then the account would have had $2.5 billion in it. The point is that this is a lot of money unaccounted for.
Even more strangely, if Donald Trump was sitting on this hidden pot of gold somewhere, why did he only report the interest on it for one year out of the ten? Did that bank account somehow only exist for one year? Even if the size of the bank account fluctuated, the interest he made each year would have merely fluctuated accordingly, and he would have reported some level of interest income on it each year. It wouldn’t have suddenly came into existence one year and then vanished the next, unless Trump somehow managed to open a bank account and promptly put a billion dollars into it, only to liquidate the entire thing before year’s end. Or did Trump indeed make interest on that account every year during that decade, and he only made the mistake of reporting the interest during the one year?
This also raises other questions. If Donald Trump had a billion dollars or more sitting in a secret bank account that he tried to keep off the books, the money had to come from somewhere. This came in the same timeframe in which he claimed to have lost a billion dollars thanks to nearly all of his business ventures being failures. Are we talking about the same billion dollars here? Did Trump funnel his business profits into one big secret account, and then falsely claim they all lost money? This will all be investigated and exposed – but it’s already looking rather ugly for Trump.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report