And he gets away with it again and again
Trump said he couldn’t release his tax returns because he was under audit. We all knw that was a lie. But it’s interesting to see how he came up with it. (And it’s pretty clear Chris Christie is the source of this story.)
In her eagerly awaited book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman describes the scene on Trump’s plane just before Super Tuesday, 1 March 2016.
Trump, she says, was discussing the issue with aides including Corey Lewandowski, then his campaign manager, and his press secretary, Hope Hicks. The aides, Haberman says, pointed out that as Trump was about to be confirmed as the favourite for the Republican nomination, the problem needed to be addressed.
Haberman writes: “Trump thought for a second about how to ‘get myself out of this’, as he said. He leaned back, before snapping up to a sudden thought.
“‘Well, you know my taxes are under audit. I always get audited,’ Trump said … ‘So what I mean is, well I could just say, ‘I’ll release them when I’m no longer under audit. ‘Cause I’ll never not be under audit.’”
She writes that Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who became a Trump surrogate after dropping out of the primary himself, “looked puzzled”, then told Trump there was no legal prohibition against releasing tax returns under audit.
“‘But my lawyers,’ Trump said. ‘I’m sure my lawyers and my counsel will tell me not to.’ He then told his bodyguard, Keith Schiller, to coordinate with his assistant, Rhona Graff, once they landed.”
It is not clear Trump received any legal advice before starting to use the excuse.
“Almost immediately,” Haberman writes, Trump “began citing the claim that he couldn’t possibly release his under-audit taxes”.
No lawyer was consulted, I’m sure. If they were they would have told him that the audit excuse was bs. But all Trump ever needs is just something to say, even if it makes no sense. He’s gotten away with doing this his entire life.
Trump didn’t invent right wing perfidy and he certainly didn’t invent the underhanded politics practiced by the Republican party. But he has modeled for the country a new kind of shamelessness that had been rewarded by millions of people, many of whom also know he’s lying but admire him for being so smart and devious.