Trump must disclose taxes
DONALD Trump is a rich man. Exactly how rich is unknown. About $10bn, as he has claimed? Or $4.5bn, as Forbes counted? Perhaps just a few hundred million? Voters likely won’t know unless Trump releases his tax returns, a modern tradition for presidential candidates that Trump says he can’t follow because he’s being audited — even though experts say an audit has no legal bearing on whether Trump can share his returns.
The point of releasing his returns isn’t merely to satisfy idle curiosity about the size of his income. It’s to reveal whether he pays a reasonable amount of tax and the scope of his charitable giving — and, importantly, to give a sense of where his financial interests and conflicts might lie if he does become president.
It’s not unreasonable to wonder whether Trump, who brags about the art of the deal, would make his presidential decisions with his business holdings in mind.
Those foreign holdings could create conflicts between Trump’s personal financial interests and US national interests, giving foreign leaders ways to use Trump’s holdings as leverage to influence federal policy.
Consider what’s happening in Turkey, where Trump’s ugly antiMuslim rhetoric has earned him the enmity of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had taken part in a ribbon-cutting of Trump Towers Istanbul in 2012.
In the wake of Trump’s comments on the campaign trail, Erdogan said his presence at the opening was a mistake and called for Trump’s name to be stripped from the towers.
Similarly, Trump has holdings and interests in Russia, with which the US has been engaged in an increasingly fraught back-andforth over Syria, Crimea and other international flash points.
The question is what would Trump do if his business interests conflicted with the national interest? Given that Trump is pimping his hotel in Washington and other business ventures at campaign news conferences, there’s reason to be nervous.
Trump has said that if he wins, he would turn the reins of the Trump Organization over to his children, who are already active in the business. But Trump can’t erase his knowledge of what buildings and projects bear his name — and in which countries — and neither can the leaders of other nations.
Trump’s position is untenable, and he needs to show voters that he has a realistic plan for disentangling himself from his empire if he wins in November. Los Angeles, September 23 2016