Talking points
A foundation of tax fraud
A “blockbuster” piece of investigative journalism has eviscerated President Trump’s reputation as a “self-made businessman,” said Paul Krugman in The New York Times. Few of us believed that Trump, the son of a real-estate mogul, made his fortune “from humble roots,” as he tells gullible supporters. Yet it’s still astonishing to learn that Trump’s father gave him an annual allowance of $200,000 in today’s dollars when he was 3 and had made him a millionaire by age 8, as my Times colleagues learned in a yearlong investigation. By scrutinizing more than 100,000 pages of Fred Trump’s tax returns and business and bank records, the Times found that Fred funneled his son $413 million in today’s dollars through at least 295 income streams and shell corporations, “many of them illegal on their face,” said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com. The statute of limitations may have passed, but there’s a word for “people who make large sources of money from illegal activity: criminals.”
All wealthy people dodge taxes, especially inheritance taxes, said Holman Jenkins in The Wall Street Journal. “Show me a wealthy entrepreneur” whose family paid the full estate tax, “and I will show you an entrepreneur who died unexpectedly.” No wonder this story landed “like a lead balloon,” said Jonathan Tobin in NationalReview .com. Nobody needs a 15,000-word investigation to know that “the son of a man whose wealth was estimated in the hundreds of millions wasn’t a Horatio Alger hero.” Trump supporters actually admire and envy the tactics the Times uncovered: He “outfoxes” the IRS and “thumbs his nose at the governing and chattering classes while doing so.”
Legally outfoxing the IRS is one thing, said Paul Waldman in WashingtonPost.com, but we now have hard evidence that the president participated in schemes to break tax laws “on an absolutely gigantic scale.” The White House called the story “very boring,” hoping it would be quickly forgotten in the flood of Trump scandals. But New York city and state officials are already examining the Times’ accusations, and Trump could face millions in civil fines. More importantly, with years of his business dealings still a mystery, it’s become even more essential that Americans see the president’s tax returns. If Democrats take back the House, that must remain a top priority, “no matter what else is competing for our attention.”