Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig of the New York Times have obtained “printouts from [President Donald] Trump’s official Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts, with the figures from his federal tax form, the 1040, for the years 1985 to 1994.” They combined those forms with some sleuthing through public Treasury Department documents to put together a pretty clear reconstruction of the demise of Trump’s fake financial empire in that time period, as literally everything he touched turned to shit.

You’re going to want to read the whole thing for yourself, especially because the article is absolutely blooming with snide remarks, artful putdowns and almost joyous snark at the president’s expense. It’s kind of glorious the way the reporters revel in exposing Trump for his fraud and fake persona. They inform us that his “self-spun narrative of business success” is the rankest pike of manure and that he “continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.” I can picture their smiles as they type out gems like, “In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer.”

My personal favorite comes at the very end when the plunge the shiv in where they know it will hurt the worst:

At his nadir, in the post-recession autumn of 1991, Mr. Trump testified before a congressional task force, calling for changes in the tax code to benefit his industry.

“The real estate business — we’re in an absolute depression,” Mr. Trump told the lawmakers, adding: “I see no sign of any kind of upturn at all. There is no incentive to invest. Everyone is doing badly, everyone.”

Everyone, perhaps, except his father, Fred Trump. While Donald Trump reported hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for 1990 and 1991, Fred Trump’s returns showed a positive income of $53.9 million, with only one major loss: $15 million invested in his son’s latest apartment project.

I mean, that’s absolutely brutal. After detailing how Trump published The Art of the Deal in a year in which he lost $4.5 million and explaining that that was by far his best year in the records, they conclude by noting that his father’s only losses were from his investment in his son.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Trump made a small fortune in the 1980’s through the ethically and legally dubious practice of pumping and dumping stocks. Neither will be you shocked to learn that even those massive gains did little to offset his business losses and that he ultimately got burned at his own game.

The same tactic continued to work through 1988. Mr. Trump made a total of $57 million by briefly presenting himself as a takeover threat to, among others, Hilton Hotels, the Gillette razor company and Federated Department Stores, casino regulators found.

In all, from 1986 through 1989, Mr. Trump declared $67.3 million in gains from stocks and other assets bought and sold within one year.

By 1989, investors were less fooled by his moves. That September, he bought a large stake in American Airlines and announced a takeover bid.

“I’m very skeptical of everything this man does,” Andrew Geller, then an airline analyst at Provident National Bank in Philadelphia, told The Associated Press.

Mr. Trump was rebuffed, and the stock price fell sharply. Though at the time his losses were reported to be modest, the new tax return figures show that in 1990, the year he sold his American Airlines stake, Mr. Trump lost $34.9 million on short-term trades, wiping out half his gains from the previous four years.

I suppose Trump deserves some small degree of credit for reviving his fortunes after being the fourth worst businessman in the entire country in the 1985-1994 time period.

Beyond the $46.1 million loss that his core businesses logged in 1985, Mr. Trump’s tax information shows that he carried over $5.6 million in losses from prior years. The I.R.S. data on one-third of high-income tax returns that year lists only three taxpayers with greater losses…

…In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years.

He somehow turned being a spectacularly pathetic businessman into a hit television program about him being a spectacularly good businessman. And that allowed him to sell his name as a brand and actually make some profits for once in his life.

With the help of Vladimir Putin he pulled off the biggest con in recorded history by convincing just enough of the electorate that The Apprentice was real.

Is it any wonder he has no respect for us?