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Before the presidency there is a paper trail: a company, a civil-rights suit, four corporate bankruptcies, a television contract, two settlements and a set of tax documents. What follows is only what is written down somewhere with a date on it. Nothing here rests on what anyone remembers.
Donald Trump becomes president of the family real-estate business his father Fred had built in Brooklyn and Queens, and later renames it the Trump Organization. It is the vehicle for everything that follows.
In October 1973 the United States sued Fred Trump, Donald Trump and Trump Management in federal court in Brooklyn, alleging they refused to rent to Black applicants and steered them to other buildings. The government’s evidence included rental applications marked with a “C”. The case ended in a consent decree entered in June 1975 requiring equal-housing advertising, vacancy lists for community groups, staff training and record-keeping the government could inspect.
A consent decree settles a case without deciding it. Nothing in it is a finding that the company discriminated, and nothing in it is a finding that it did not.
Trump-controlled casino companies filed for Chapter 11 four times: the Taj Mahal in 1991, Trump Plaza in 1992, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts in 2004, and Trump Entertainment Resorts in 2009. These are corporate reorganizations, not personal bankruptcy — he has never filed personally.
Four is the count the fact-checks converge on, by corporate filing. Six appears when separately-filing entities inside the same reorganization are counted one by one. Both are defensible; they answer different questions, and a page that printed only the larger without saying so would be choosing a number for its size.
Fourteen seasons as host made him a national television figure. The New York Times, working from two decades of his tax records, put the show and everything that followed from it at $427.4m — $197m from the program itself and $230m from the licensing, endorsement and seminar deals his raised profile made possible.
The same reporting found that persistent losses at his own businesses offset almost all tax on it.
Three lawsuits alleging that his real-estate seminar business advertised falsely were settled days after the 2016 election. A federal judge finalized the $25m settlement in April 2018; former students were expected to recover 80 to 90 percent of what they paid.
Settled without an admission of liability.
The New York attorney general sued over the use of the Donald J. Trump Foundation for political and business purposes. The foundation was dissolved under court supervision and in November 2019 a judge ordered him to pay $2m to eight charities; about $1.7m remaining in the foundation was distributed to other non-profits.
The New York Times, from more than 100,000 pages of financial documents including his father’s confidential tax returns, reported that he received at least $413m from Fred Trump’s empire over the decades — against his own long-stated account of a single $1m loan.
Disputed. A lawyer for Trump said there was no fraud or tax evasion and called the facts in the report “extremely inaccurate”. The figure is the Times’ reading of the documents, not a court’s finding.
No family recollections, no accounts of his upbringing, and no characterization of anyone’s motives. Those are memoir. They cannot be checked, they are contested by the people in them, and a page that mixed them with a docket number would make the docket number look like an opinion too.
The permanent dives behind this beat — the counted record, not the news.