One of Trump’s headline tax cuts would have saved him $31 million in taxes in 2005

Two of US president Donald Trump’s tax cut plans announced today stand out as being clearly beneficial to…Donald Trump and his family.

• The Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT): Designed to ensure that the super-rich have at least one loophole they can’t jump through—or, as the Internal Revenue Service puts it, so they “pay at least a minimum amount of tax”—this forced Trump to fork out an extra $31.3 million in 2005, as we learned when part of his tax return for that year was leaked. That pushed his total tax rate up to 25% on earnings of $153 million—which means he paid in the tax bracket that normally covers a married couple making from $75,000 to $152,000. If the AMT it didn’t exist he would have paid just $7.1 million, or 4.6%.

(We don’t know if Trump has paid taxes any other year in the last two decades—returns from 1995 show he could have offset them for 18 years.)