Trump Tax Returns: IRS Files Show Over $1 Billion In Losses On His Businesses From 1985 To 1994

While it’s long been suspected that Donald Trump's financials were inflated, a report Tuesday from the New York Times, citing IRS tax transcripts, showed that from the years 1985 to 1994 Trump's businesses lost over $1 billion.

"Year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer," the Times article read, which specifically showed that he lost $1.17 billion.

Trump’s argument, especially in the early 90s, was that the recession that hit during 1990 was a major factor for his notorious string of reversals and bankruptcies that hit his businesses. However, the piece shows that Trump’s financial woes began far earlier than most people thought.

Susanne Craig, one of the authors on the piece, told CNN's Anderson Cooper that the losses were “just for his core business” and that she and co-author Russ Buettner found that Trump lost money in every year. She added that the losses grew every year and seemed to get worse when Trump’s casino started hitting financial problems.

Craig expressed a level of shock at the mounting losses, saying that they “would have thought in one of the years that we saw, maybe the year he wrote ‘Art of the Deal,’ he would have made money. He didn’t. He was just bleeding money every year that we looked at and his businesses.”

Craig also explained that the losses were even more staggering when compared against other taxpayers. She explained that they compared the tax information they had gathered against tax data from people making a “fair bit of money.”

She and Buettner found that Trump was, consistently, the largest financial loser year over year.

Craig clarified that the information the Times was using was from an IRS transcript. She said that the White House's response was that it "was simply saying the numbers in it were wrong but they have not provided us with any information about what is wrong."

Trump, himself, took to Twitter on Wednesday morning to push back against the report, calling it a "fake news hit job."

Trump's taxes have been a key issue on Capitol Hill since he took office. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Monday denied a request for six years of Trump’s business and personal tax returns.

Richard Neal, the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, said Tuesday that Democrats could head to federal court and skip the subpoena or contempt vote to get Trump’s tax returns.