By Eric Bradner CNN
Donald Trump confronted a report that cast doubts on whether he has paid income taxes head-on Monday, pitching himself as a master of the tax code intent now on using those skills to help working Americans.
“I’m working for you now, I’m not working for Trump,” he told hundreds of supporters here in this Western swing state.
In his first rally after The New York Times reported that Trump lost $916 million in 1995 — which would have allowed him to reduce or eliminate his income tax burden for 18 years — Trump acknowledged that in business, “it’s my job to minimize the overall tax burden.”
The Times did not look at Trump’s federal return. It obtained one page of his New York State resident income tax returns as well as the first page of New Jersey and Connecticut nonresident returns. CNN has not independently verified the documents’ authenticity, but Trump’s campaign has not challenged any of the facts reported by The Times.
“I have legally used the tax laws to my benefit … Honestly, I have brilliantly used those laws,” Trump said.
Reading from a teleprompter, Trump cast his 1995 losses as a comeback from a tough financial period.
“The news media is now obsessed with an alleged tax violation from the 1990s, at the end of one of the most brutal economic downturns in our country’s history,” Trump said.
“The conditions facing real estate developers in that early-90s period were almost as bad as the Great Depression of 1929 and far worse than the Great Recession of 2008 — not even close,” he said.
Trump called the era “a bad time — it was an ugly time. A lot of people you won’t ever hear from again from that period. But I never had any doubts. … I knew in my heart that when the chips are down, that is when I perform my very best.”
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