Opinion: Oops! How Trump undercut his effort to keep tax returns hidden
By Greg Sargent Greg Sargent Opinion writer covering national politics Email Bio Follow Opinion writer May 9 at 5:06 PM The other day, after the New York Times reported that Donald Trump had sustained enormous financial losses from 1985 to 1994, allowing him to pay no taxes for many years, Trump lashed out. He claimed that this was S.O.P. for real estate titans like himself, adding that they were “entitled to massive write offs” that would show “tax losses.
As Hemel notes, the types of chicanery Trump admitted to varies in its nefariousness — but the bottom line is that Trump was publicly boasting about his ability to game the tax code to vastly minimize his tax burden. As we already know from a separate Times investigation, Trump and his father committed epic tax fraud, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, inflating the very fortune that has long fraudulently sustained his public image as a brilliant self-made businessman.
For this reason, and to assure Americans that taxes aren’t just for the little people, the IRS has established a special procedure to audit the returns of the president and vice president — a procedure designed to reduce the risk that enforcement will be skewed to favor our leaders. But this procedure does not, according to the IRS’s internal manual, apply to returns filed by the president’s business enterprises.
Trump, by boasting before the country that he thinks tax-dodging is cool, strengthened the public rationale for making sure that the IRS is indeed enforcing tax laws against the president. To be sure, Trump has boasted of this before — during the 2016 campaign, he said that minimizing his tax burden “makes me smart” — but the difference now is that Trump made this boast as president.
As Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, points out, the president of the United States has publicly confirmed that he thinks skirting the tax code is something to wear as a badge of honor, which raises questions as to whether the IRS is making sure he isn’t taking this too far.
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