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domingo, outubro 04, 2020
Tax Records Reveal How Fame Gave Trump a $427 Million Lifeline - The New York Times
"From the back seat of a stretch limousine heading to meet the first
contestants
for his new TV show “The Apprentice,” Donald J. Trump bragged that he
was a billionaire who had overcome financial hardship.
“I used my brain, I used my negotiating skills
and I worked it all out,” he told viewers. “Now, my company is bigger
than it ever was and stronger than it ever was.”
It was all a hoax.
Months after that inaugural episode in January
2004, Mr. Trump filed his individual tax return reporting $89.9 million
in net losses from his core businesses for the prior year. The red ink
spilled from everywhere, even as American television audiences saw him
as a savvy business mogul with the Midas touch.
Twelve years later, that image of the
self-made, self-saved mogul, beamed into the national consciousness,
would help fuel Mr. Trump’s improbable election to the White House.
But while the story of “The Apprentice” is by
now well known, the president’s tax returns reveal another grand twist
that has never been truly told — how the popularity of that fictional
alter ego rescued him, providing a financial lifeline to reinvent
himself yet again. And then how, in an echo of the boom-and-bust cycle
that has defined his business career, he led himself toward the
financial shoals he must navigate today.
Mr. Trump’s genius, it turned out, wasn’t
running a company. It was making himself famous — Trump-scale famous —
and monetizing that fame.
By analyzing the tax records, The New York
Times was able to place a value on Mr. Trump’s celebrity. While the
returns show that he earned some $197 million directly from “The
Apprentice” over 16 years — roughly in line with what he has claimed — they also reveal that an additional $230 million flowed from the fame associated with it.
The show’s big ratings meant that everyone
wanted a piece of the Trump brand, and he grabbed at the opportunity to
rent it out. There was $500,000 to pitch Double Stuf Oreos, another
half-million to sell Domino’s Pizza and $850,000 to push laundry
detergent.
There were seven-figure licensing deals with
hotel builders, some with murky backgrounds, in former Soviet
republics and other developing countries. And there were schemes that
exploited misplaced trust in the TV version of Mr. Trump, who, off
camera, peddled worthless get-rich-quick nostrums like “Donald Trump Way to Wealth” seminars that promised initiation into “the secrets and strategies that have made Donald Trump a billionaire.”
Just as, years before, the money Mr. Trump secretly received from his father
allowed him to assemble a wobbly collection of Atlantic City casinos
and other disparate enterprises that then collapsed around him, the new
influx of cash helped finance a buying spree that saw him snap up golf
resorts, a business not known for easy profits. Indeed, the tax records
show that his golf properties have been hemorrhaging millions of dollars
for years."