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      Trump May Owe $100 Million From Double-Dip Tax Breaks, Audit Shows

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      Former President Donald J. Trump used a dubious accounting maneuver to claim improper tax breaks from his troubled Chicago tower, according to an Internal Revenue Service inquiry uncovered by The New York Times and ProPublica. Losing a yearslong audit battle over the claim could mean a tax bill of more than $100 million.The 92-story, glass-sheathed skyscraper along the Chicago River is the tallest and, at least for now, the last major construction project by Mr. Trump. Through a combination of cost overruns and the bad luck of opening in the teeth of the Great Recession, it was also a vast money loser.But when Mr. Trump sought to reap tax benefits from his losses, the I.R.S. has argued, he went too far and in effect wrote off the same losses twice.The first write-off came on Mr. Trump’s tax return for 2008. With sales lagging far behind projections, he claimed that his investment in the condo-hotel tower met the tax code definition of “worthless,” because his debt on the project meant he would never see a profit. That move resulted in Mr. Trump reporting losses as high as $651 million for the year, The Times and ProPublica found.There is no indication the I.R.S. challenged that initial claim, though that lack of scrutiny surprised tax experts consulted for this article. But in 2010, Mr. Trump and his tax advisers sought to extract further benefits from the Chicago project, executing a maneuver that would draw years of inquiry from the I.R.S. First, he shifted the company that owned the tower into a new partnership. Because he controlled both companies, it was like moving coins from one pocket to another. Then he used the shift as justification to declare $168 million in additional losses over the next decade.The issues around Mr. Trump’s case were novel enough that, during his presidency, the I.R.S. undertook a high-level legal review before pursuing it. The Times and ProPublica, in consultation with tax experts, calculated that the revision sought by the I.R.S. would create a new tax bill of more than $100 million, plus interest and potential penalties.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The One Thing Voters Remember About Trump

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      What one thing do you remember most about Donald Trump’s presidency? In April as part of the New York Times/Siena College survey, we called about 1,000 voters across the country and asked for their most prominent memory of the Trump years. Here’s what they said, in their own words. “His honesty” Trump supporter in 2024 […] More

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      Biden Looks to Raise Taxes on Wealthy and Corporations to Shave Deficit

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      Lael Brainard, the director of the National Economic Council, said lawmakers should raise taxes on companies and the wealthiest while extending the 2017 cuts for those making less than $400,000.President Biden’s top economic adviser said on Friday that lawmakers should take advantage of a looming tax debate next year to try to reduce budget deficits by sharply raising taxes on corporations and the rich.Under that plan, Mr. Biden would more than offset the cost of maintaining tax cuts for people earning $400,000 a year or less.In a speech to the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington, Lael Brainard, who directs the White House National Economic Council, gave the most detailed explanation yet of how Mr. Biden would seek to shape what promises to be a multitrillion-dollar tax debate.A batch of tax cuts signed into law in 2017 by former President Donald J. Trump, who is facing Mr. Biden in a rematch this fall, is set to expire at the end of next year. It includes cuts for individuals at all income levels. Republicans built that expiration into the tax bill to reduce its projected cost to deficits and comply with congressional rules.Ms. Brainard’s speech renewed Mr. Biden’s commitment to reducing taxes for middle-class Americans and for raising them on high earners. But her remarks expressed more concern about growing debt and deficits than the president and his aides had previously demonstrated when discussing the looming tax debate.“At minimum, we should avoid making the fiscal hole created by Republican tax cuts deeper, by fully paying for any tax cuts that are extended,” Ms. Brainard said, in remarks released by the White House. “And we should use the 2025 tax debate as an opportunity to meet our national needs by raising revenue overall by asking the wealthy and large corporations to pay their fair share.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Effort to Keep Biden on the Ballot in Ohio Stalls Out Ahead of Deadline

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      A partisan battle in Ohio has stalled an effort by state lawmakers to ensure that President Biden is on the ballot in the state this November, teeing up what could be an expensive and protracted legal battle ahead of this year’s election.Ohio was one of three states that had warned the Democratic Party that Mr. Biden could be left off the ballot because the Democratic National Convention would take place after certification deadlines for presidential nominees. This is usually a minor procedural issue, and states have almost always offered a quick solution to ensure that major presidential candidates remain on the ballot.Alabama, for example, resolved the issue with little fanfare last week, when the State Legislature overwhelmingly passed a law granting an extension to the deadline accommodating the late date of the Democratic convention, which is scheduled to begin Aug. 19. Election officials in Washington State also signaled that their state would accept a provisional certification of Mr. Biden’s nomination.Legislation similar to the law adopted in Alabama was proposed in the Republican-dominated General Assembly in Ohio but stalled out ahead of a Thursday deadline given by Frank LaRose, the Republican secretary of state, to change the law. Mr. LaRose has said that the legislature could still resolve the issue with an emergency vote.Republicans in the Ohio Senate advanced a bill on Wednesday that would resolve the issue but attached a rider that would ban foreign money in state ballot initiatives, over the objections of Senate Democrats. The House speaker, Jason Stephens, who is fending off a monthslong effort by some Republicans to oust him and needs support from Democratic lawmakers in the minority to stay in power, did not take up the measure, and the legislature adjourned with no solution in place.Charles Lutvak, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said that Mr. Biden would be on the ballot in all 50 states.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mike Johnson Becomes the Speaker of the Whole House. For Now.

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      Democrats saved the speaker but want to oust him at the ballot box in November, while his standing in his own party remains in serious question.The notion that the speaker serves the whole House is often tossed around, but rarely the case.While the position is established in the Constitution and under longstanding House rules entails presiding over the entire institution, the speaker has historically played a highly political role, installed by the majority party to ruthlessly execute its will and legislative agenda. But circumstances have changed.Representative Mike Johnson can now, for better or worse, truly lay claim to being speaker of the whole House, after Democrats saved him from a Republican-led coup on Wednesday in another remarkable moment in a chaotic Congress filled with them. Had Democrats not come to his rescue, the votes existed in his own party to potentially oust him.It was the logical outcome of a session in which House Democrats, despite being in the minority, have repeatedly supplied the votes and even the procedural backing to do most of the heavy legislative lifting to stave off default, fund the government and aid U.S. allies, forming an uneasy coalition government with more mainstream Republicans.The result left Mr. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican still new to the job, indebted to Democrats even as he immediately sought to distance himself from them by emphasizing his deep conservative credentials. Democrats said their support for him underscored their bona fides as the grown-up party willing to go so far as to back a conservative Republican speaker to prevent the House from again going off the rails.Now the two parties will have to navigate this previously unexplored terrain as they head into an election season that will determine who is speaker next year.The reality is that after passing the foreign aid package including funding for Ukraine that prompted the push by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, to depose Mr. Johnson, little polarizing legislative work remains to be done this Congress while the fight for House control is about to get into full swing. That fact led Mr. Johnson to walk off the House floor to high-fives from his Republican supporters and quickly try to remind his colleagues and America that, despite the decisive Democratic assist, he is still a die-hard right winger.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Barron Trump Is Picked to Be a Florida Delegate at the Republican Convention

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      After years in which his privacy has been fiercely guarded and he has been kept out of the political arena, former President Donald J. Trump’s youngest son, Barron, was chosen to be one of Florida’s delegates to the Republican National Convention.Barron, who turned 18 earlier this year and will graduate high school this month, will be one of 41 at-large delegates at the party’s national meeting in July, when the G.O.P. is expected to officially nominate his father as the Republican presidential candidate. His selection was reported earlier by NBC News.The youngest Trump will be joined in the delegation by his two more politically active brothers, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., both of whom have appeared on the campaign trail or done interviews to support their father’s candidacy.Mr. Trump’s younger daughter, Tiffany, will also be a Florida delegate. Ivanka Trump, his eldest child, was not on the list.Though politicians’ children often hit the trail to stump alongside their parents, Barron Trump has largely been absent from his father’s campaign this year. It remains to be seen whether he will give a speech at the Republican convention, as his siblings did in 2016 and 2020.For the past several years, Barron has been attending a private high school near Florida. His graduation, on May 17, became a point of contention in Mr. Trump’s hush-money trial in Manhattan because it overlaps with the court schedule.The judge in the case initially delayed a decision on whether court would be in session that day, prompting complaints from Mr. Trump, but he eventually agreed to allow the day off from court.The Florida party’s list of delegates further demonstrates the extent to which the Trump family and Mr. Trump’s supporters have moved to the center of Republican politics. His daughter-in-law, Lara, who is married to Eric Trump, was made co-chair of the Republican National Committee earlier this year.The Florida delegation list also includes Kimberly Guilfoyle, the fiancée of Donald Trump Jr., and Michael Boulos, Tiffany Trump’s husband. Other longtime Trump allies were also chosen, including Isaac Perlmutter, the former Marvel Entertainment chief executive who is a major donor, and the real-estate investor Steve Witkoff, a longtime friend of Mr. Trump.Michael C. Bender More

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      Podesta Meets With China’s Climate Envoy Amid Deep Economic Tensions

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      Beijing’s dominance raises economic and security concerns, and tensions will be on full display as top climate diplomats meet this week.The world’s two most powerful countries, the United States and China, are meeting this week in Washington to talk about climate change. And also their relationship issues.In an ideal world, where the clean energy transition was the top priority, they would be on friendlier terms. Maybe affordable Chinese-made electric vehicles would be widely sold in America, instead of being viewed as an economic threat. Or there would be less need to dig a lithium mine at an environmentally sensitive site in Nevada, because lithium, which is essential for batteries, could be bought worry-free from China, which controls the world’s supply.Instead, in the not-ideal real world, the United States is balancing two competing goals. The Biden administration wants to cut planet-warming emissions by encouraging people to buy things like EVs and solar panels, but it also wants people to buy American, not Chinese. Its concern is that Chinese dominance of the global market for these essential technologies would harm the U.S. economy and national security.Those competing goals will be on vivid display this week, as the Biden Administration’s top climate envoy, John Podesta, meets for the first time with his counterpart from Beijing, Liu Zhenmin, in Washington.Trade tensions are likely to loom over their talks.The flood of Chinese exports, particularly in solar panels and other green-energy technology, has become a real sore spot for the Biden administration as it tries to spur the same industries on American soil. Mr. Podesta has sharply criticized China for having “distorted the global market for clean energy products like solar, batteries and critical minerals.”Not only that, he has set up a task force to explore how to limit exports from countries that have high carbon footprints, a practice that he called “carbon dumping.” That was considered a veiled reference to China.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden Looks to Thwart Surge of Chinese Imports

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      The president has proposed new barriers to Chinese electric vehicles, steel and other goods that could undermine his manufacturing agenda.President Biden is warning that a new surge of cheap Chinese products poses a threat to American factories. There is little sign of one in official trade data, which show that Chinese steel imports are down sharply from last year and that the gap between what the United States sells to China and what it buys is at a post-pandemic low.But the president’s aides are looking past those numbers and fixating on what they call troubling signs from China and Europe. That includes data showing China’s growing appetite to churn out big-ticket goods like cars and heavy metals at a rate that far exceeds the demand of domestic consumers.China’s lavish subsidies, including loans from state-run banks, have helped sustain companies that might otherwise have folded in a struggling domestic economy. The result is, in many cases, a significant cost advantage for Chinese manufactured goods like steel and electric cars.The U.S. solar industry is already struggling to compete with those Chinese exports. In Europe, the problem is much broader. Chinese exports are washing over the continent, to the chagrin of political leaders and business executives. They could soon pose a threat to some of the American companies that Mr. Biden has tried to bolster with federal grants and tax incentives, much of which comes from his 2022 climate law, U.S. officials warn.In an effort to avoid a similar fate, Mr. Biden has promised new measures to shield steel mills, automakers and other American companies against what he calls trade “cheating” by Beijing.European officials are struggling to counter the import surge, an issue they focused on this week when President Xi Jinping of China visited the continent for the first time in five years. In a meeting on Monday with Mr. Xi and President Emmanuel Macron of France, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, urged Mr. Xi to address the wave of subsidized exports flowing from his nation’s factories into Western countries.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More