Fact check: Did Harris exaggerate scale of Trump’s pre-career inheritance?

United States Vice President Kamala Harris has periodically needled her opponent in the presidential race, former President Donald Trump, over his business record.

During a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina on September 12, Harris touted her plan to provide a $50,000 tax deduction for small business startups, then segued into a knock on how Trump started his own business career.

“You know, not everybody started out with $400m on a silver platter and then filed for bankruptcy six times,” Harris said.

Harris used a similar line the same day in an appearance in Greensboro, North Carolina, two days earlier in her debate with Trump, and in a livestreamed conversation Oprah Winfrey hosted on Thursday.

During the debate, Trump responded, “I wasn’t given $400m. I wish I was. My father was a Brooklyn builder. Brooklyn, Queens. And a great father, and I learned a lot from him. But I was given a fraction of that, a tiny fraction, and I built it into many, many billions of dollars.”

What Harris said about six bankruptcies is accurate, but she took some liberties with what is known about Trump’s inheritance from his father, real estate developer Fred Trump.

Harris’s campaign did not respond to an inquiry for this article.

Did Trump start out with $400m?

The definitive 2018 analysis of Trump’s finances by New York Times journalists David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner found that Trump had received roughly that sum from his father or his father’s estate, but that it was spread out over the course of his life, not when he was starting out in the business world.

“The Times’ investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day,” the article said.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, left, and Democratic challenger Kamala Harris during a presidential debate on September 10 [Robert F Bukaty/AP Photo]

The Times detailed two streams of money that went to Trump before he went to work for his father, in 1968 after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania — money he would have been able to access before he “started out” in the business world.

One involved “ground lease payments”, a financial strategy in which Fred Trump built apartment buildings, then set up lease agreements for the land under these buildings. The beneficiaries of those lease agreements were Fred Trump’s children — eventually five, including Donald — through a trust. Fred Trump set up ground leases for two of his developments in Brooklyn, the first of which became active when Donald Trump was three years old, the Times reported.

The second mechanism for shifting assets involved what the Times called a “mini-empire” of real estate consisting of eight buildings with 1,032 apartments. Fred Trump would build or buy buildings in Brooklyn or Queens and then gradually transfer ownership to his children “through a web of partnerships and corporations” without fanfare, the Times found. This process began just before Donald Trump’s 16th birthday, the Times wrote.

“It was easy money for the Trump children,” the Times wrote. “Their father took care of everything. He bought the land, built the apartments and obtained the mortgages. His employees managed the building. The profits, meanwhile, went to his children. By the early 1970s, Fred Trump would execute similar transfers of the other seven buildings.”

The Times calculated that when he was in high school, Donald Trump’s cut of the profits was “about $17,000 a year in today’s dollars”, rising to $300,000 a year soon after he graduated from college.

The Times was not specific about how much Trump would have received from his father by the time he entered the real estate business with the family company, but it appears to be somewhere in the $1m to $2m range once adjusted for inflation. That is a lot — much more than Harris’s proposal of $50,000 for new startup businesses — but it is far below the $413m Harris cited.

There is an important caveat: Trump may not have had the money in his pocket when he started out, but he had a reasonable expectation of inheriting a share of Fred Trump’s business in the future.

When Fred Trump brought Donald Trump into the family business following his college graduation as vice president of multiple subsidiaries, according to the Times, the elder Trump “telegraphed what had become painfully obvious to his family and employees: He did not consider his eldest son, Fred Trump Jr., a viable heir apparent.”

“President Trump turned his inheritance into a multibillion-dollar empire — which is the definition of the American dream,” Republican National Committee spokesperson Anna Kelly told PolitiFact.

Did Donald Trump undergo six bankruptcies?

This is accurate.

Trump’s six bankruptcies were:

• The Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1991.
• The Trump Castle casino in Atlantic City, 1992.
• The Trump Plaza and Casino in Atlantic City, 1992.
• The Plaza Hotel in New York City, 1992.
• Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts, with properties in Atlantic City and Indiana, 2004.
• Trump Entertainment Resorts, the successor company to Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts, 2009.

When Trump was first running for president, experts told PolitiFact in 2016 that Trump did not bear 100 percent of the fault for the bankruptcies; even the most successful business owners experience duds, and some of that stems from conditions in their industry beyond their control.

“The only difference is that Trump puts his name on his companies, which means people associate them with him, but he’s not at all the leader in the bankruptcy space,” said Adam Levitin, a Georgetown University law professor.

Our ruling

Harris said Trump “started out with $400 million on a silver platter and then filed for bankruptcy six times”.

There is no question that the former president had a strong financial wind behind him when he started out, and he always had a reasonable expectation of inheriting a share of his father’s business. But he did not begin his business career with $400m available to him.

A comprehensive New York Times review of the Trump family finances in 2018 found that Donald Trump received $413m from Fred Trump or his estate over the course of his lifetime. However, all but perhaps $1m or $2m of that amount reached the son after he had already begun working for the family business.

Trump’s companies have filed for bankruptcy six times, as Harris said.

The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details, so we rate it Half True.