2016 Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump, ironically, was apparently aligned politically with Brooklyn's Democratic Party machine organization during the same period when he was given a big tax break for his Hotel Commodore real estate project by New York City's local government; which was then managed by local Democratic Party politicians on behalf of special real estate interests (like the Trump family firm) and special corporate and Wall Street interests. As the 1992 book by former Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett, Trump: The Deals and The Downfall, observed:
"With Stanley Steingut as [NY State] assembly speaker and [Abraham] Beame as [NYC] mayor, the ancient and insular wing of the Brooklyn [Democratic] party long identified with the Trump family was now the most powerful Democratic faction in state and city politics...
"On May 20, 1976, the [New York City] board [of estimate], which met in the upper floor of {new York's] City Hall, unanimously passed the [Hotel] Commodore deal...The private parties hadn't put a dime on the table, while the public sector had delivered a gigantic and exclusive tax break...Trump had been handpicked by bureaucrats and politicians to become the solitary recipient of an unprecedented give away, stretched so far into the future that it was statistically likely to outlive even its [then-] 30-year-old beneficiary...No other Manhattan hotel would ever receive so selective and grand a subsidy...
"...Without the guarantee Fred [Trump II] wound up giving his son, Donald [Trump] would have had no Commodore mortgage...Fred [Trump II] was his silent partner in the Commodore project...
"Donald [Trump]...went from paying $42,386 in taxes in 1977 to paying none in 1978 and 1979. He escaped tax liability in 1979 on at least $3.4 million in earnings with a carefully structured package of real estate losses and interest payments..."
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