Golden age of grifting

When you think about it there is really only one person who could be President in these times.

Mr. Trump was able to lose all that money without facing the usual consequences — such as a steep drop in his standard of living — in part because most of it belonged to others, to the banks and bond investors who had supplied the cash to fuel his acquisitions. And as The Times’s earlier investigation showed, Mr. Trump secretly leaned on his father’s wealth to continue living like a winner and to stage a comeback.

This is not to say that Mr. Trump never made money on a deal. One that turned out quite well came in 1985, when he bought the Hotel St. Moritz in Manhattan for $73.7 million. Mr. Trump has said he sold it for $180 million in 1989. His tax information showed long-term capital gains of $99.8 million, accounting for the vast majority of such gains in the 10 years reviewed by The Times.

But that rich payday was overwhelmed by his business losses, and Mr. Trump still paid no federal income taxes that year.

Some fraction of that ocean of red ink represented depreciation on Mr. Trump’s real estate. One of the most valuable special benefits in the tax code, depreciation lets owners of commercial real estate write down the cost of their buildings.

“I love depreciation,” Mr. Trump said during a presidential debate in 2016.

Mr. Trump defended this tax strategy on Wednesday and said in a pair of Twitter posts that this was what real estate developers did in the 1980s and 1990s.

Developers “were entitled to massive write offs and depreciation which would, if one was actively building, show losses and tax losses in almost all cases,” Mr. Trump said.