--- title: Donald Trump Tax Return Revealed on Rachel Maddow description: Donald Trump's 2005 tax return was revealed on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show. canonical: https://time.com/4701747/donald-trump-rachel-maddow-taxes/ author: Alex Altman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2017-03-15T01:23:29.000Z article:modified_time: 2023-12-13T10:46:41.000Z article:section: Politics og:title: Donald Trump's 2005 Tax Return Revealed on Rachel Maddow og:description: The return showed Trump earned $150 million that year og:url: https://time.com/4701747/donald-trump-rachel-maddow-taxes/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd9fd224a8a9b4f97/6988be63cf40a829f0c46d5e/donald-trump-taxes.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2560 og:image:height: 1440 og:image:alt: US-TRUMP-HEALTHCARE og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Donald Trump's 2005 Tax Return Revealed on Rachel Maddow twitter:description: The return showed Trump earned $150 million that year twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd9fd224a8a9b4f97/6988be63cf40a829f0c46d5e/donald-trump-taxes.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Donald Trump's 2005 Tax Return Reveals He Paid $38 Million in Taxes on $150 Million Income > Sponsored content. 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It explains the politics, personalities and power dynamics behind the headlines, twice a week. #### Where can I get analysis of Washington politics by email? D.C. Brief is TIME's free Washington politics newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. It is written by a TIME senior correspondent who covers the capital full time. #### Who writes TIME's D.C. Brief? Philip Elliott, a senior correspondent at TIME, writes D.C. Brief. #### Is D.C. Brief free? Yes. D.C. Brief is free at time.com/newsletters. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-dcbrief-2026q3/newsletters?i=75739d4e-2038-45c4-b91c-15ba6b741791&cr=time-nl-dcbrief-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Reporter Who Received Trump Tax Returns Speaks Out [Watch (HLS stream): Reporter Who Received Trump Tax Returns Speaks Out](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/ipIq5xPU.m3u8) (2:44)  _Published 2017-03-15. David Cay Johnston, the investigative reporter who received Donald Trump's 2005 tax returns, speaks to CNN's Chris Cuomo and Poppy Harlow._  by [Alex Altman](https://time.com/author/alex-altman/)  ## Alex Altman Altman is the executive features editor and deputy Washington bureau chief at TIME. Updated: Dec 13, 2023 10:46 AM UTCPublished: Mar 15, 2017 1:23 AM UTC  by [Alex Altman](https://time.com/author/alex-altman/)  ## Alex Altman Altman is the executive features editor and deputy Washington bureau chief at TIME. Updated: Dec 13, 2023 10:46 AM UTCPublished: Mar 15, 2017 1:23 AM UTC President Donald Trump paid $38 million on more than $150 million in [income](http://time.com/4506757/donald-trump-ethics-conflict-business/) in 2005, a White House official said Tuesday night. The disclosure, which fills in a small data point in one of the big lingering mysteries looming over Trump’s presidency, came just before the figures [The two-page form](http://www.msnbc.com/sites/msnbc/files/trump2005tax.pdf), which is labeled “Client Copy,” doesn’t reveal the sources of Trump’s income, which has been the primary reason for Democrats to call on Trump to release his returns David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer-prize winning investigative journalist and veteran tax reporter, was leaked Trump’s 1040 [tax form](http://time.com/money/4556172/donald-trump-medicare-tax/) from 2005 and brought the document to Maddow. > [](https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/841825498091134976) “It came in the mail over the transom,” explained Johnston, now the editor and founder of DCReport.org. The numbers, he said, “fit the things we know” about Trump’s finances from other public records. The document indicates that Trump, who defied decades of political convention by [declining to release his tax returns](http://fortune.com/2017/01/20/donald-trump-taxes-white-house-petition/) during his campaign for President, paid a roughly 25% effective tax rate in 2005. The document shows that Trump paid $5.3 million in taxes and another $31.2 million due to his obligations under the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), which is designed to ensure a baseline tax payment for some payers. During his campaign, Trump proposed scrapping that tax. Trump’s tax returns in the years since remain a mystery. Democrats have cited the absence of disclosure as an indication that Trump is hiding something. Nearly 1.1 million people have signed a White House petition urging Trump to “immediate release” his full returns. The White House official denounced the disclosure of the 2005 return as an illegal act. “You know you are desperate for ratings when you are willing to violate the law to push a story about two pages of tax returns from over a decade ago,” the White House official said, noting that Trump had a responsibility to “his company, his family and his employees” to pay no more tax than he was legally obligated. “Mr. Trump paid $38 million dollars even after taking into account large scale depreciation for construction, on an income of more than $150 million dollars,” the official said, “as well as paying tens of millions of dollars in other taxes such as sales and excise taxes and employment taxes and this illegally published return proves just that.” During the presidential campaign, Trump proposed cutting taxes, especially for the very wealthy, reducing the current seven tax brackets to four: 0%, 10%, 20% and 25%. Trump’s tax reform plan is not expected to be brought up until after Congress completes its work on healthcare reform, an effort that has faced significant headwinds. Trump’s income puts him in the highest of the current brackets, 39.6%, though it is normal for the very wealthy to pay a far lower effective tax rate. Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney paid a 14.1% effective rate in 2011. Citing an ongoing audit for which he never supplied proof, Trump declined to release his recent returns during the campaign. Asked last week whether Trump would release his 2016 returns, Press Secretary Sean Spicer said: ““My understanding is he’s still under audit and I’ll follow up on the question.” Every major presidential candidate in recent history has disclosed their returns, including 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. She and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, earned $10.75 million in 2015, and paid a 34.2% federal tax rate. The disclosure, Maddow said, is “only a start.” _With reporting by Zeke J. Miller_ ## Transcript How did you get this? It just came in the mail to my home. I was down in Palm Beach looking at Mar- a- Lago when I got a phone call from one of my grown children that this had come in the mail to my house in Rochester, New York, and I high tailed it up to New York City. You don't know who sent it to you. You didn't solicit it. You didn't ask anybody for it. Correct. Hm. But it had two very important words on it. Client copy. What does that tell you? Well, it tells me that, first of all, it didn't come from the Internal Revenue Service, which probably got it electronically. It came probably from someone who was given that copy, either because they worked through the accounting firm who worked on this. The accounting firm had no comment. Or it was produced in litigation. Or it was produced in some regulatory proceeding. And somebody had access to it. And I think the reason they probably sent it to me is because I've written so much about negative incomes and how they are used by wealthy people not to pay taxes and the alternative minimum tax. Do you think it was possible that it was sent to you by the President? Yes. Donald has a long history of leaking things About himself and doing it directly and indirectly. So it's a possibility. The anger with which the White House responded suggests to me not likely, however. It's when something gets leaked he's happy about, he doesn't complain. The Trumps that year had $ 150 million of income. About $ 3 million a week They also though took $ 103 million of negative income. And I believe that's from a tax shelter that the president bought- What is negative income? It's reverse numbers. You're in the hole. And- So you've lost money. That's right. And in Trump's case, he shouldn't have negative income. He didn't pay back banks about $ 918 million. The banks took that loss But the President bought a tax shelter that allowed him to take it as well. Double taking the loss. And- Legal? Congress, the Republicans and Congress shut that off the minute they learned about it. But you know what they do? They let the people who already bought the tax shelter keep their ill got tax savings. So legal, but they changed the law subsequently. That's correct. He wants a tax policy that will benefit Him, he wants to live like a king and pay taxes like he's a popper. And we can't run our military and the FBI and all the other things that are needed to make America a free and independent country without tax revenue. So was it the best number to show how much money he makes. Right. It doesn't show anything nefarious. Correct. And He winds up coming out looking like see, what's the big deal? If we don't see, though, his entire return, which is probably around 1, 000 pages, for many years- But who would have client copy of just a few pages? We [ INAUDIBLE ] And not the whole thing? It could be a function of who had time to go to a photo copier, I don't know. Mm. But Donald Trump is unique in that he is not showing his tax returns as everybody else has done. Right. 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