Many suspicious returns
One of the enduring questions of Donald Trump’s presidency has been why he broke four decades of tradition in refusing to release his tax returns, and lied about how he wished he could but couldn’t.
Now, thanks to The New York Times, we have some answers — and even more serious questions.
Perhaps most troubling is how deep in debt and other liabilities Mr. Trump is. He could be hit with a $100 million bill from the Internal Revenue Service over a possibly improper $72.9 million loss he claimed years ago. He’s also personally on the hook for $421 million in loans coming due in the next four years.
That makes Mr. Trump’s finances a matter of keen public interest. This is not just Mr. Trump’s problem. The potential for such an indebted person to be compromised seems enormous. And as we’ve already seen, Mr. Trump is perfectly willing to use the presidency to enrich himself corruptly — accepting money from foreign interests and lobbyists who patronize properties like his Wash
ington, D.C., hotel, trying to get the G-7 to hold its annual meeting at one of his country clubs, and reportedly telling a U.S. ambassador to use his influence to arrange for the British Open to be held at his golf course in Scotland. What would such a president do to avoid collapse of his empire and personal destitution? That’s not all the returns reveal. They show how he leeches off the American public. Here is someone whose ventures pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars annually, who used them to fund an extravagant lifestyle complete with $70,000 in hairstyling bills, yet paid no personal income tax for ten of the past 15 years.
A whiz at business? Please. While accountants and lawyers do the work of helping him avoid taxes, his returns show an undeniable fact: His businesses lose a lot of money, and he’s propped up substantially by the debt bearing down on him.
And he isn’t a billionaire, as Forbes long ago concluded.
But if Mr. Trump is a fake, the issues his tax returns raise are quite real. It ought to embarrass his Republican allies that a man who pays zero dollars in taxes was their champion in 2017 in their quest to give wealthy individuals and corporations even more tax breaks — and put the nation deeper in debt that future generations of working people who do pay taxes will have to pay off.
Even some wealthy people have remarked at the lopsidedness of a tax code that, as Warren Buffet famously noted, has his secretary paying a higher tax rate than he does.
For Congress, Mr. Trump’s taxes should be exhibit A in the case to revisit a tax code written too often by the rich, and for the rich.
And for voters — including those who fell for his “man of the people who tells it like it is” veneer — the revelations should be a call to toss out not just a bogus billionaire but a gravely conflicted president, and put one in office who might actually make the rich — and whatever Donald Trump is — pay their fair share.