During the now acting president’s first debate with Hillary Clinton four years ago, she accused him of not releasing his taxes because he was hiding something. It was because he’d paid nothing in taxes for years.
“That makes me smart,” Trump interrupted.
No, it makes him broke. (Does Kimberly Guilfoyle know?)
A New York Times bombshell report Sunday on years of Trump taxes reveals:
Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.
He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.
The Times has obtained what Trump has long sought to keep from investigators: “tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization.”
Trump is deeply in debt. If he loses his dispute with the Internal Revenue Service over the validity of a $72.9 million tax refund, he could owe the government more than $100 million after including interest. He has hundreds of millions in loans coming due in the next few years with no way to repay them. Some he personally guaranteed.
A couple of key quotes:
“Ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life.”
“To see what a successful business looks like, depreciation or not, look no further than one in Mr. Trump’s portfolio that he does not manage.”
“[Trump] is personally responsible for loans and other debts totaling $421 million, with most of it coming due within four years. Should he win re-election, his lenders could be placed in the unprecedented position of weighing whether to foreclose on a sitting president.”
Sunday’s lengthy report is just the overview. There is nothing more on Trump’s financial dealings with Russian oligarchs, but enough to whet the appetite for more. Not to worry. The Times reassures that “additional articles will be published in the coming weeks.”
Sunday’s revelations and those to come may or not further weaken the former reality TV star. But, warns The New Yorker‘s Jelani Cobb, they could make him more dangerous:
The Times says it will not release Trump’s documents to protect sources who had legal access to them. One wonders who they might be. Bankers? Federal officials? Perhaps other civil servants, as Cobb suggests, frustrated that William Barr’s Department of Justice will subvert the law to protect a deeply corrupt president? Trump will want to know. The hunt has already begun.
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s team responded nimbly with “I paid more in taxes than Donald Trump” vinyl stickers and a video:
The Trump tax revelations may make no difference to golf-cart-driving #MAGA retirees in Florida. But they may give tax-paying working people pause for reflection before voting this fall.
When Trump leaves for Florida for the last time, he may still own his private jet. When Biden left town for Wilmington, Delaware in January 2017, he took Amtrak.
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