I’m using the Fredo clip from the Ethics Alarms clip library because I was right in my assessment of the Trump tax return nonsense when it surfaced in 2016. So were a lot of other commentators. I didn’t write all of the conclusions down on Ethics Alarms, but I had plenty of discussions about it with my Trump Deranged friends and others. A summary:
- Trump was obviously lying in 2016 when he said that there were legal reasons he couldn’t release his tax returns as had become the norm for Presidential candidates, but that he would release them as soon as the issues were resolved. He’s the first business tycoon to run for President, and he knew that the returns would show exactly the kind of legal tax avoidance that the returns of every other wealthy, risk0taking, entrepreneurial individual shows. This would arm Democrats and others to make the usual “rich people are crooked and evil” attacks, as is their wont, and he judged, probably correctly, that his chances of being elected were better if he kept the returns private, as he had every right to do. He could have and should have done this and been honest about the reason.
- Everyone should have known not going to be anything illegal in the returns, because the IRS accepted them. Sure enough, when they were released this week, there wasn’t.
- The Washington Post headline, “House panel releases Trump tax returns in another setback for former president,” is incompetent, biased, and insulting to anyone who isn’t Trump Deranged or ignorant. The returns are a triumph for Trump. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he was counting on their being released. Democrats had essentially promised that there would be evidence of dark doings: as with the Mueller Report, it is a dud. Now the question is why Democrats were allowed to breach the guaranteed confidentiality of a citizen’s returns when there was no evidence of a crime.
- The returns show that Trump lost money while he was President. Of course he did…yet the Big Lie spread by the Axis of Unethical Conduct is that he became President to enrich himself. A Trump-Deranged troll on another thread repeated that talking point yesterday. Becoming President made the Obamas rich; it made the Clintons rich. Trump was rich already: his Presidency made him poorer, and he almost certainly knew it would.
- Now come the tit-for-tat arguments demanding that members of Congress explain how they have become wealthier during their tenures in office. Well, good. Liz Cheney’s net worth reportedly increased from $6M to to $36 in six years. How did that happen? The House blood-lust just handed Trump a potent weapon to expose his enemies.
- David Cay Johnston wrote a Trump Derangement classic for the Daily Beast headlined, “Trump’s Taxes Are the Best Case Yet for Putting Him in Prison.” It’s a funny headline, because the “best case” is in fact lousy: if the Justice Department is foolish enough to indict Trump based on the weak investigative tea brewed by the January 6 Commission witch hunt, it might be a tie. It reminded me why I no longer waste time with the Daily Beast, which is like an online MSNBC now. Seth Barrett Tillman wrote an easy and unduly respectful rebuttal of Johnston’s desperation post, and concludes,
“At this juncture, can you point to even one specific entry in any of Trump’s tax filings which you know to be fraudulent or, even, merely in error? That being the situation, your article’s title mentioning “prison” seems overly ambitious given what is now known about Trump’s past tax filings.”
