Trump tax returns
Not only has every presidential nominee in modern history made their tax returns public, making Trump’s refusal stand out all the more, but his stated reason for not releasing them is factually incorrect.
He says he can’t release them because he is being audited but other nominees have released their taxes while being audited and there is no reason whatever, no law, that says a citizen cannot make their returns public while under audit. The tax department has said as much.
So the Democrats, the media and the electorate are aware that there must be another reason that Donald Trump will not release his taxes. And now, courtesy of Donald Trump Jr., that reason has at last been revealed.
So why then? Well, according to Trump’s oldest son, it is because they’d be a distraction. That is what Trump Jr. told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review last week: they’d “distract from” his father’s “main message.”
“Because he’s got a 12,000-page tax return that would create…financial auditors out of every person in the country,” Trump Jr. said. He added that everyone would then start “asking questions that would distract from his main message” and that the questions would “detract” from his father’s campaign.
Trump: hiding something?
That is, of course, code for ‘my Dad’s taxes contain information he doesn’t want the Democrats to get their hands on and the public to know.’ After all, if Trump’s taxes showed an citizen who paid his share, a taxpayer who didn’t use loopholes to avoid taxes and didn’t conduct shady business dealings, what kind of a distraction would that be for the Trump campaign?
A really good one.
Naturally if his returns showed him in a positive light he’d want the voters to know about the sizable contribution he is making to the country. But if he cheats or seeks loopholes – he’s bragged about avoiding taxes and calls it “The American way” – then not so much.
Someone who agrees with that assessment is Donald Trump himself. In the 2012 election he criticized Mitt Romney for not releasing his returns right away, saying that if they showed he paid his taxes there was no reason not to release them.
“It’s a great thing when you can show that you’ve been successful and that you’ve made a lot of money,” he said (Romney did release his returns).
The only Trump taxes made public are from 1981 and they show he did not pay any federal taxes whatever, using loopholes to declare, as developers are wanton to do if they can get away with it, that he had a negative income. In the past, Trump has characterized those who do that very thing as people who “get away with murder.”
“They make a fortune. They pay no tax,” he told CBS last year about corporate execs and the rich who use loopholes to avoid being taxed. “It’s ridiculous, okay?”
So Trump finds that rich people who avoid taxes are abhorrent and, thanks to his son, we now know that he doesn’t want the public to learn that he is one of those rich people. Does that mean he finds himself abhorrent?
To Russia with Trump
There are other reasons for Trump to stonewall the electorate about his taxes and Chris Cillizza speculates about them in the Washington Post. Cillizza notes that in addition to the likelihood he pays no taxes, he may not be as rich as he boasts and may have ties to Russian oligarchs.
If conducting business in a foreign country it behooves a developer to know what is going on in that country and Trump, who has little general knowledge, seems nonetheless to know a lot about Russia; he also admires Vladimir Putin. Many U.S. businesses deal with Russian interests and if Trump does he might feel the optics would not be good.
And finally there has long been speculation that Donald Trump has dealings with illicit groups, one of them the mafia. Those reports have been circulating for decades, something GOP rival Ted Cruz commented on in February.
“There have been multiple media reports about Donald’s business dealings with the mob, with the mafia,” Cruz said. “Maybe his taxes show those business dealings are a lot more extensive than has been reported.”
Here’s the bottom line: with Trump Jr. admitting they worry about the distraction his father’s tax returns would cause, it becomes apparent they contain information voters would not like. Which translates into this: we will never, ever see Donald Trump’s tax returns.
Pity.
