Trump made $150 million in 2005 and paid $38 million in federal taxes

The White House said on Tuesday that President Donald Trump paid $38 million in federal income taxes in 2005 — on $150 million in earnings — offering a small glimpse at the president’s personal finances, which Trump has so far kept almost entirely private.

The administration offered those details in a statement after journalist David Cay Johnston published two pages of tax information about the president, apparently from Trump's 2005 return. The revelations were simultaneously broadcast on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow" show, which included an interview with Johnston. Based on the information on the two pages, Trump paid an effective tax rate of about 25 percent.


The returns, which POLITICO could not independently confirm, but which the White House appeared to acknowledge were legitimate, also showed Trump wrote off more than $100 million in business losses in 2005.

“Before being elected President, Mr. Trump was one of the most successful businessmen in the world with a responsibility to his company, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required," The White House said in a statement. "That being said, Mr. Trump paid $38 million dollars even after taking into account large scale depreciation for construction, on an income of more than $150 million dollars, as well as paying tens of millions of dollars in other taxes such as sales and excise taxes and employment taxes and this illegally published return proves just that."

While initially promising to release his returns ahead of the 2016 election, Trump hedged and then resisted repeated calls to do so during the campaign. Trump has argued that his taxes are under audit by the IRS — and said that he would be happy to release them after the audit was complete. There are no IRS rules that prohibit someone from releasing their tax returns publicly while they are under audit.

By refusing to release his returns, Trump eschewed decade of precedent — every candidate since 1976 had released their returns, when former President Gerald Ford released only summary data.

The new documents, which were posted online and broadcast on MSNBC, show Trump and his wife Melania paid $5.3 million in standard federal income tax and more than $31 million in the alternative minimum tax. The Alternative Minimum Tax is intended to prevent taxpayers from excessively reducing their tax liabilities by taking many or sizable deductions.

Trump has proposed eliminating the AMT as part of an overhaul of the tax code.

Johnston is a former reporter for The New York Times who won a Pulitzer prize for his coverage of the tax system. He runs a web site, dcreport.org, which crashed soon after he posted the tax documents.

The purported tax documents, which were aired live on MSNBC, bore a stamp that read “Client copy.” Johnston said the documents were sent to him, but said he did not know where they came from. At one point, as he spoke to Maddow, Johnston seemed to imply that Trump himself may have sent him the returns.

"It's entirely possible Donald (Trump) sent this to me," he added. "Donald has a long history of leaking material himself."

In the run up to their publishing, Maddow created an Internet frenzy — hyping them on Twitter and setting off more than an hour of speculation. But the documents, which were incomplete, were short of salacious revelations.

According to the document, Trump earned about $150 million, including some $32 million in capital gains.

But he reported a $100 million loss he was able to subtract from that. MSNBC only released the first two pages of the return, and it’s impossible to tell from them what produced that loss.

Trump’s adjusted gross income was $48.5 million that year. He took $17 million in itemized deductions against that, though, again, the documents do not detail speifics. Among the likely candidates: a deduction for state and local taxes important to high-tax states like New York.

That left Trump with about $31.5 million in taxable income, and his regular income tax on that was about $5.3 million.

But the alternative minimum tax, which was designed to prevent the wealthy from ducking the tax man, forced Trump to pay an additional $31.2 million in taxes.

“If it weren’t for the AMT, he’d pay a very, very low tax rate,” said Roberton Williams, a fellow at the Tax Policy Center.

Many lawmakers, like Trump, have called for eliminating the AMT, which critics say is overly complicated.

Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., seemed to revel in the — in relative terms — mundane nature of the revelations, tweeting: “Thank you Rachel Maddow for proving to your #Trump hating followers how successful @realDonaldTrump is & that he paid $40mm in taxes!”

Still, fresh information on Trump’s taxes has been relatively rare.

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In October, at the height the 2016 presidential campaign, The New York Times obtained and published three pages of Trump’s 1995 state tax returns, which showed he took a deduction of $916 million on losses, which could have allowed him to avoid paying taxes for 18 years.

While it’s not unusual that Trump would use that tax break, the losses he claimed were so large they amounted to almost 2 percent of all such deductions claimed that year by taxpayers.

In June 2016, POLITICO reported that Trump likely paid no taxes for at least two years in the 1990s. The Washington Post has also previously reported that Trump paid no taxes in 1978 and 1979.

Tuesday's Trump tax news also shared some details with the earlier Times report: Both of the scoops arrived in the mail.

In the same way New York Times reporter Susanne Craig got her hands on Trumps 1995 tax records In September, Johnston said someone just mailed him Trump's 2005 1040 tax form.

"It came in the mail over the transom," Johnston said on MSNBC.

Johnson did not immediately respond to a Twitter message seeking comment to why he chose to break the story on MSBNC.

Toby Eckert, Hadas Gold, Brian Faler and Cristiano Lima contributed to this report.

