Eric Trump admits father ‘was millions and millions in debt’ at one time
Oct 3, 2016, 9:24 AM | Updated: 9:30 am
(AP Photo)
(AP Photo)
The weekend storm kicked up by a New York Times story on Donald Trump’s tax records has his son Eric Trump, shaking his head and defending his father.
The younger Trump told KTAR’s Arizona’s Morning News on Monday that, “This is a 21-year-old story. I know the media is melting down when they are coming up with this stuff.”
According to tax experts, Trump claimed more than $900 million in losses in 1995, enough to legally reduce his tax bill to zero for as many as 18 years.
The Trump campaign did not specifically address the story, but issued a statement:
“Mr. Trump is a highly-skilled businessman who has a fiduciary responsibility to his business, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required. That being said, Mr. Trump has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes, sales and excise taxes, real estate taxes, city taxes, state taxes, employee taxes and federal taxes. Mr. Trump knows the tax code far better than anyone who has ever run for President and he is the only one that knows how to fix it.”
The younger Trump questioned Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s time as head of the State Department and how she has made the money she has in recent years after her and former President Bill Clinton, her husband, left the White House “dead broke.”
He also explained that more than 20 years ago the real estate business collapsed and many people, including his father, lost a lot of what they had.
“I think one of my father’s greatest attributes, to tell you the truth, is, he built an amazing company [and] when the world imploded in the early ’90s and interest rates went up to 20 percent and the real estate industry died in this company, everybody lost everything,” Eric Trump said.
“He was millions and millions and millions of dollars in debt and he worked and he fought and he came back out of it and his company and our company is the greatest it has ever been before.”
The candidate would be the first in decades to not release them before election day.
Donald is expected to speak in Prescott Valley, Arizona on Tuesday afternoon. It will be his sixth visit to the state since he announced he was running for president in June 2015.
