While it’s true that President Donald Trump’s personal and business taxes are largely a black hole to the public, some information has come out about them in dribs and drabs. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Tax What we know — and don’t know — about Trump’s taxes

President Donald Trump has zealously guarded his tax returns from public disclosure, and he is headed for a legal showdown with House Democrats who want to pry them loose.

But even as that battle plays out, there are some details that have already emerged about Trump’s troubled financial history.


Here’s what we know — and don’t know — about Trump’s personal and business taxes.

The latest: Trump claimed $1.17 billion in losses from 1985 to 1994, allowing him to avoid taxes for eight of those 10 years, according to IRS tax transcripts obtained by the New York Times and reported Tuesday. That includes red ink from scattered business ventures that soured, including his casinos in Atlantic City, N.J.

“His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years,” the Times said.

Trump also benefited from the ability to write down the costs of his real estate, something known as depreciation. Trump says it was all part of the “sport” of doing business back then.

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“Sometimes considered ‘tax shelter,’ you would get it by building, or even buying,” he wrote Wednesday on Twitter. “You always wanted to show losses for tax purposes ... almost all real estate developers did — and often re-negotiate with banks, it was sport,” he continued.

Zero income taxes: Trump paid no federal income taxes in 1978 and 1979, and apparently none or next to none in 1991 and 1993, the Washington Post and POLITICO reported separately in spring 2016, based on records from New Jersey gaming regulators.

He reported negative income for '78 and ’79. Casino and hotel losses were cited for the ‘90s.

The $916 million loss: Trump claimed nearly $1 billion in net operating losses in 1995, according to three pages of returns for that year from three different states that were anonymously sent to the Times in late 2015. The losses were so big that they could have wiped out Trump’s tax liability for the next 18 years, and POLITICO reported they amounted “to almost 2 percent of all such deductions claimed that year.”

Experts said it was impossible to tell from the returns how he generated such massive losses.

An ‘edgy’ tactic: Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income from canceled debt in the early 1990s, the Times reported, by arguing that the income qualified for an exception that was at the time used by insolvent corporations.

The maneuver was edgy but not unique, POLITICO reported: “Not only was there no law permitting the exception, there wasn’t a clear precedent in case law or IRS guidance.”

Rich guy, low rate: In one of its only detailed public statements about Trump’s tax situation, the White House said in 2017 that Trump paid $38 million in federal income taxes in 2005, on $150 million in earnings.

The disclosure came after journalist David Cay Johnston published two pages of returns showing that Trump paid an effective tax rate of about 25 percent in 2005. That year, the top marginal rate was 35 percent.

A tangled web: Trump got at least $413 million (in today’s dollars) from his father in the 1990s, mostly by using tax dodges, the Times reported last year. They allegedly included avoiding gift taxes and taking inappropriate write-offs.

Unanswered questions: Given that all the information in those reports dates back a decade or more, Democrats want to get their hands on Trump’s more recent returns, from 2013 to 2018. They say they need them to investigate how well the IRS performs its routine audits of sitting presidents.

But they also hope they will answer questions like how much Trump currently pays in taxes, what tactics he has used to lower them and any possible conflicts of interest the returns could potentially reveal, with foreign actors and others. They could also try to make them public.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin rejected the request on Monday, saying Democrats lack “a legitimate legislative purpose.”

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) indicated Tuesday that the next stop on the issue would be federal court.

CORRECTION: David Cay Johnston‘s name was misspelled in an earlier version of this article.