It seems that the press has been obsessed in the last few days about an alleged loss that Donald Trump had 21 years ago.  First off, sharing confidential tax return information is against the law so the tax records were illegally obtained.  Second there is a major discrepancy in the pages shared by the NY Times.  Being a tax person, I was curious what was shown on the return so I looked it up on google.

There is nothing from Trumps 1995 federal return but there are 3 pages from different state returns, one page each from New York, Connecticut and New Jersey.  The NY and CT returns show the 900+ million dollar loss that has been reported widely in the press.  But, the NJ return shows income from all sources to be a positive of over 19 million dollars, roughly 1.5 million of that coming from NJ sources.  So, did he make 19 million or lose 900 million.  Apparently, the 900 million dollar loss is a better story so they went with that.  By the way, sharing confidential tax information is a crime so I will not be providing a link to the pages, but I’ll bet if you search for Trump tax records and NY times you can find it… unless they remove it from their site.