Donald Trump's business career is, you'll be amazed to hear, not quite the gilded procession from success to bigger success to truly gargantuan, globe-swallowing success he's traditionally presented it as. In fact, for a decade, his businesses lost money hand over fist. He was less The Art of the Deal and more The Paul Blart: Mall Cop of the Deal.

According to the New York Times, Trump's core businesses lost more than a billion dollars between 1985 and 1994. To be exact, he lost $1.17 billion, including losing more than $250 million in both 1990 and 1991. The losses came from his hotels, apartment buildings and casinos. Casinos! Where people literally throw money at you! Where you need an industrial vacuum cleaner to pick up all the loose tenners!

While Trump lawyer Charles Harder called the report "highly inaccurate", the Times says the figures come from printouts of Trump's official Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts. Those transcripts, incidentally, also say that the losses mean Trump didn't pay any income tax in eight of the 10 years shown.

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Though Trump has never declared personal bankruptcy, his businesses have declared chapter 11 bankruptcy - where debt is restructured and negotiated while the business continues to trade - on six occasions between 1991 and 2014.

You'll recall that Trump's charge toward the White House was built largely on his deal-making and business acumen. "We need a leader that wrote The Art of the Deal," Trump said in 2015 when announcing his run for the Republican presidential candidate. Tony Schwartz, ghostwriter of the 1987 opus, would have been quite surprised to hear about that, and not least because he ended up with a $500,000 advance and nearly half of the profits from the book. Good negotiating!

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