Government spending, particularly the generous big-landlord benefits in law and tax policy, helped the U.S. president build up his real estate fortune, writes Fran Quigley.
Fred Trump and his son Donald, around 1986, at New York City’s Wollman Ice Rink in Central Park, which was renovated by their company between 1980 and 1986. (Bernard Gotfryd, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
By Fran Quigley
Common Dreams
President Donald Trump is making good on his promised threat to “dismantle Government bureaucracy” and “cut wasteful expenditures,” issuing orders to choke off the funding pipeline for federal grants and assistance programs.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking because government spending, particularly the generous big-landlord benefits baked into U.S. law and tax policy, forms the very foundation of Trump’s own wealth.
The Trump real estate fortune was built by hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies and huge tax breaks, none of which are available to the working people Trump is hurting with his current attacks.
Trump became wealthy the traditional American way: he was born into it. As most thoroughly described in Samuel Stein’s excellent 2019 book, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, Donald’s father Fred’s real estate empire began with Brooklyn and Queens housing developments financed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).
For some of those Trump developments, the path was literally cleared by government demolition of existing homes and buildings.
Fred Trump’s appetite for government funding was so voracious that he was investigated by the Senate Banking Committee for defrauding post-World War II government housing programs by lying about the costs of his projects.
That was not the only investigation targeting Fred Trump’s government-funded properties. His Maryland buildings were so decrepit and his ignoring of the residents’ pleas for help and city orders to repair so blatant that the elder Trump was actually arrested in 1976 for operating a “slum property.”
A U.S. Department of Justice discrimination lawsuit during the same era showed that the Trump properties systematically blocked Black prospective renters, using racist practices like attaching to their applications a paper bearing a big letter “C” — for Colored — so they could be rejected out of hand.
That federal housing discrimination lawsuit, filed in 1973, did not just name Fred Trump. It also included the company’s president, his 27-year-old son Donald.
Donald Trump soon followed in his father’s footsteps by exploiting government programs to develop his buildings. The benefits included an unprecedented 40-year tax abatement, funding that was designed to support low-income neighborhoods, sweetheart deals to privatize public land and government bonds used to finance his developments.
“Donald Trump is probably worse than any other developer in his relentless pursuit of every single dime of taxpayer subsidies he can get his paws on,” a New York deputy mayor told The New York Times in 2016.
Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan. (Jorge Láscar, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
For example, the famous Trump Tower benefited from over $163 million in tax abatements provided by New York politicians whose campaigns Trump helped fund.
That money was part of what the Times estimated was nearly a billion dollars Trump received in government grants and tax breaks for his New York properties alone, not counting the government benefits for his properties in Florida, Nevada and Atlantic City.
“Donald Trump’s business wouldn’t be possible but for major government subsidies,” Timothy O’Brien, author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald, told NPR.
Trump’s dependence on government funding is more than matched by the taxpayer dollars hoovered up by his designated government waste czar Elon Musk.
As CNN has reported, the world’s richest person reached his status thanks to government loans and contracts that propped up Tesla and SpaceX in their vulnerable beginning stages. Musk still rakes in billions of dollars from government contracts and government-mandated payments to Tesla by other automakers.
“The foundation for Musk’s financial success has been the U.S. government,” tech analyst Daniel Ives told CNN.
We know that the Trump-Musk attacks on federal government programs are deeply harmful to vulnerable people, devoted civil servants and communities and organizations trying to make the world a better place.
[CN: The Jan. 27 government memo freezing grants and subsidies says, “any program that provides direct benefits to Americans is explicitly excluded from the pause and exempted from this review process. In addition to Social Security and Medicare, already explicitly excluded in the guidance, mandatory programs like Medicaid and SNAP will continue without pause.”]
Less well known is that Trump and Musk both owe their fortunes and careers to the very government spending they demonize now. They used government programs to climb to great heights, and now are intent on pulling up the ladder behind them.
Former Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson once said that a hypocrite politician is one who cuts down a redwood tree, then stands on its stump to deliver a speech about conservation.
When the wealthy and powerful Donald Trump mounts his attacks on government programs, he does so while standing on a platform built by government largesse.
Fran Quigley directs the Health and Human Rights Clinic at Indiana University McKinney School of Law.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
“The Government-Funded, Landlord Trump”, as it did Elon Musk and ‘Bill’ Gates; to name only 3 of the top plutocratic, self-aggrandizing, leading ‘heavies’!
“A U.S. Department of Justice discrimination lawsuit during the same era showed that the Trump properties systematically blocked Black prospective renters, using racist practices like attaching to their applications a paper bearing a big letter “C” — for Colored — so they could be rejected out of hand.”
And who was it that helped the Trumps when they got hit by this?
Roy Cohn, of course.
M A G D = Make … Another … Great … Depression
First we had Bidenomics, which were identical to Hoovernomics. Concern about ‘the deficit’ leading to a “let them suffer” attitude to Americans and the results such as a massive increase in homelessness. Now, we have Trumpnomics which is going to doubledown on Hoovernomics.
Read any old history book (I don’t know about new history), and you will find that Hoover’s protectionist policies were a key factor in sending America and the World into the Great Depression. Hoover wanted to “protect American industry” (really “Protect American Oligarchs), so Hoover put massive tariffs into place. Guess what Trump is doing?
Trump is causing massive inflation. Some of the inflation that got blamed on Biden was from Trump’s tariffs, which of course show up in stats as higher prices. Fairly, since Biden as well was willing to have inflation to ‘”get China”. The President from MasterCard didn’t care. Inflation is just a field on a spreadsheet to the rich. Consider the way the rich measure “Core Inflation” by excluding food and energy costs. To the rich, that’s just bills to be paid by the butler and the cook. Its ordinary people who suffer when they can’t afford groceries or can’t heat their home.
Now, Trump is raising the prices of goods on the shelves, and further raising prices by taxing the intermediate goods that later get assembled in America, or the metals that America no longer produces but still needs to build anything. Even Trump has been heard to say that this will cause pain. Of course, the Democrats trot along silently, as it only means profits for Wall Street and their portfolios.
Get ready for Trumpflation.
Making Another Great depression.
One War. Class War.