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GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump needs to reveal his IRS returns.
A curious double-standard has become evident in this presidential election year.
If you want to apply for any one of dozens of top positions in the Treasury Department, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security or a number of other federal agencies, you’re required to submit to Senate investigators your income tax returns. If the IRS is auditing you, you’ll probably have to answer detailed questions about why.
But if you’re running for president, there’s no law requiring you to release your tax returns.
Donald Trump is the first major presidential candidate in modern history to keep his tax records under wraps. Such secrecy would be troublesome from any presidential candidate, but it’s particularly unacceptable from this year’s GOP nominee.
Trump’s entire campaign is predicated on boasts about his success in business, but there’s growing evidence he’s all hat and not as much cattle as he claims. One of his top aides has stated he’s worth $10 billion, but an analysis undertaken by Forbes magazine suggests he’s worth less than half of that. Here in the city that gave birth to Enron, we’ve learned the hard way we shouldn’t trust corporate executives who say, “Trust me, the money’s in the bank.”
We also can’t trust Trump’s bragging about creating jobs when he won’t release returns that would outline the extent of his business holdings. A cornerstone of his populist rhetoric is criticism of major U.S. corporations shipping jobs overseas, but without his tax records we don’t know how much his own fortune has been bolstered by overseas investments.
Trump also appears to have made a habit of vastly exaggerating to voters how much money he’s donated to charities. The Washington Post spent weeks doggedly trying to dig up proof the candidate followed through on promises to give away millions of dollars, but apparently the truth isn’t out there in the public record.
By contrast, anybody interested in Hillary Clinton’s finances can pore through her tax returns dating back to 1977. Those documents have been a touchstone for journalists and opposition researchers investigating the byzantine ways in which the Clintons have cashed in during their decades on the public stage.
What’s happened in this campaign shouldn’t be allowed to happen again. Congress needs to make this important political tradition a matter of law by passing legislation that will require presidential candidates to publicly release their tax returns.
In the meantime, voters deciding how to cast their ballots for the presidency in November need to consider a fair and simple question: What’s Donald Trump hiding in his tax returns?