Wow, thanks indeed for the advice about trust charitable donations from principal not being deductible. That's the key piece of advice that'll save me much time. I'll be glad to pay taxes on the income without any deductions, and if I go that route, I'll feel better about doing the taxes myself.
We deliberately separated the tax reporting ID's at the date of death, all income reported through that day on mom's SSN and everything after that on the Trust EIN. So I thought that makes things very clean and simple. Two tax returns, one individual and one trust (1041), all based on when the income happened.
