The $750 President
The year he was elected, Donald Trump paid $750 in federal income tax. He paid $750 again the next year. In eleven of eighteen years, he paid nothing at all.
If The Small Loan showed the fortune wasn’t self-made, this is the other half of the story: he barely pays tax on it. His own returns — obtained by The New York Times and later released by Congress — show chronic, enormous business losses that wiped out his tax bill for years. Most of that is legal, and we say so plainly. What the returns kill is the myth of the genius businessman; what they raise, in a few specific places, are questions a long-running IRS audit is still chewing on.
What this page is about
In September 2020, The New York Times reported what it found in two decades of Donald Trump’s tax records: he paid just $750 in federal income tax in 2016, the year he won the presidency, and $750 again in 2017, his first year in office. Across the eighteen years the Times examined, he paid no federal income tax at all in eleven of them. The engine was not a clever trick so much as a simple fact the brand was built to hide: his businesses lost staggering amounts of money, and losses offset taxes.
The losses go back decades — a single 1995 return showed a $916 million loss, large enough, tax experts said, to let him legally avoid federal income tax for close to two decades. Here is the part we are careful about: using business losses to offset income is legal, and we do not call it fraud. But two things sit on top of the legal core. First, the losses are real, which means the self-made genius who would “run the country like a business” is, by his own filings, a man who lost more money than almost any individual in America. Second, some specific moves are genuinely contested: a $72.9 million refund that the IRS has been auditing for years, a $70,000 deduction for hairstyling, and millions in “consulting fees” that appear to have gone to his own daughter.
So we grade the numbers as fact, the legal avoidance as legal, and the contested pieces as what they are — unresolved, some under active audit. Trump called the report “fake news” but never released the returns to rebut it; Congress later released them, and they held up.
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The $750 President.
The year he was elected, Trump paid $750 in federal income tax. He paid $750 again the next year. In 11 of 18 years, he paid nothing. The Small Loan showed it wasn't self-made; this shows he barely pays tax on it.
Seven hundred fifty dollars
The headline number, the years of zero, the losses behind them, the refund under audit, the questionable write-offs, and the myth it all demolishes.
$750 — the federal income tax he paid the year he was elected, and the year after.
FACTAccording to The New York Times's review of Donald Trump's tax-return data, he paid $750 in federal income tax in 2016, the year he won the White House, and $750 again in 2017, his first year as president. That is less than almost any salaried worker pays, from a man who ran as a multibillionaire. The figure was reported from his actual returns and later corroborated when the House Ways and Means Committee released years of his filings in 2022. Graded FACT.
Eleven of eighteen years: no federal income tax at all.
FACTThe $750 years were not anomalies. Across the eighteen years the Times examined, Trump paid no federal income tax whatsoever in eleven of them. For a figure who built a political identity on his supposed business brilliance and his fitness to manage the nation's finances, the returns tell the opposite story: year after year, his enterprises reported losing more than they made, and those losses zeroed out his obligation to the government he would later run.
The $916 million loss — legal to use, devastating to the legend.
FACTHow do you pay nothing for years? You lose enormously. A Trump tax document from 1995, obtained by the Times in 2016, declared a $916 million loss — a hole so large that tax specialists said it could have let him legally avoid paying federal income tax for roughly eighteen years, by carrying the loss forward against future income. This is the fence and the point at once: carrying losses forward is a legal, ordinary feature of the tax code, so we do not call it fraud. But the losses were real. The self-styled greatest dealmaker alive had, on paper, lost close to a billion dollars in a single year — a fact the 'genius' brand exists to keep you from noticing.
The $72.9 million refund the IRS is still auditing.
SOME SMOKEOver the eighteen years, Trump did initially pay about $95 million in federal income tax — but he later clawed back most of it through a single $72.9 million refund, obtained by claiming large losses. That refund has been the subject of a long-running IRS audit, a dispute Trump himself has repeatedly cited as his reason for not releasing his returns. If the IRS ultimately rules against him, he could owe more than $100 million with interest and penalties. We grade this SOME SMOKE: the refund and the audit are documented facts; whether the refund was legitimate is, by definition, unresolved — it is the live question the government's own auditors have not closed.
The write-offs that raise eyebrows: hairstyling, and 'consulting fees' to family.
SOME SMOKEAlongside the big losses were smaller deductions that stretch the definition of a business expense. The Times reported that Trump wrote off $70,000 for hairstyling during his years on 'The Apprentice,' and deducted roughly $26 million in unexplained 'consulting fees' over the period — a share of which appears to match payments to his daughter Ivanka, who was at the same time a salaried executive at the company. Deducting a payment to a family member as a consulting fee can function as a way to move money while shaving the tax bill. These items are reported and documented, but whether they were legitimate business expenses is contested and, like the refund, falls within the scope of the audit. We grade them SOME SMOKE — questionable, not adjudicated.
The myth it kills: 'run the country like my business.'
FACTStrip away the audit questions and one thing is simply true: the returns are fatal to the central claim of Trump's political career. He sold himself as the brilliant businessman who would bring his acumen to the federal budget — and his own filings show chronic, massive losses and years of paying the government nothing. Both of those can be legal and still be damning. The $750 isn't a scandal because it's a crime; it's a scandal because a man who paid $750 in federal income tax spent a campaign calling other people freeloaders, and because the losses that produced it expose the genius as a legend. He called the reporting 'fake news' and declined to release the returns; Congress released them anyway, and they matched.
Two halves of one myth
Read together with The Small Loan, this completes the picture the Trump brand is built to prevent. The fortune did not come from genius; it came from an inheritance moved through a tax dodge. And the genius did not even generate reliable profits; it generated losses deep enough to erase his income taxes for most of two decades. That is not, mostly, a crime — which is part of what makes it a story about Self-Dealing and the system that enables it: a tax code that lets a man lose a billion dollars and pay less than a line cook, and an audit process so slow that a disputed $72.9 million refund can sit unresolved for a decade. We keep the legal parts labeled legal and the contested parts labeled contested — and the legend dissolves either way. For the man and the fuller record, see the Donald Trump file.
Questions worth taking seriously
Isn't it legal to use business losses to avoid income tax?
Yes, mostly — and we say so. Carrying losses forward to offset income is a legal, ordinary feature of the tax code, and most of why Trump paid so little is that his businesses genuinely lost money. We don’t call that fraud. The story is two things that are both true alongside the legality: the losses are real (which destroys the business-genius brand), and a few specific items — a $72.9M refund, a hairstyling write-off, family consulting fees — are genuinely questionable and, in the refund’s case, under IRS audit.
So did he actually break the law?
Not proven. He’s been convicted of nothing over these returns. The bulk is legal avoidance; the contested parts — chiefly the $72.9 million refund — are under audit, which means the government’s own reviewers haven’t resolved them. We grade the figures as fact and the dubious items as smoke, not as crimes. The scandal doesn’t depend on illegality.
Trump called it 'fake news' — how do we know the $750 is real?
It came from his actual tax-return data, reported by The New York Times, and he never released the returns to disprove it. In 2022 the House Ways and Means Committee released years of his filings, which corroborated the picture of very low tax in multiple years. Calling a report “fake news” while refusing to release the documents that would settle it is not a rebuttal.
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This site aggregates and grades a record that other outlets and primary sources have already put on the record. Every FACT-graded claim above is sourced to court filings, government reports, sworn whistleblower disclosures, published investigative journalism, or named-source statements. The citations are the accountability mechanism; this section is how you get on the record too.
The record
- CBS News — Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes (the NYT investigation, 2020)
- Al Jazeera — five takeaways: the 11-of-18 years, the $72.9M refund, the audit
- NBC News — the House Ways and Means Committee releases Trump’s returns (2022)
- The New York Times — the broader Trump tax investigation (incl. the 1995 $916M loss)