One of the major roadblocks for Donald Trump in this election which doesn’t quite grok with his claim to be an honest political outsider is his steadfast refusal to release his tax returns – as all presidential candidates have done in the past.
It’s fairly obvious that he’s not releasing them because there’s something in there that wouldn’t look good, even to his supporters. It was probably going to be either tax avoidance / minimisation or shitty investments. Turns out it’s probably a combination of the two!
The New York Times today dropped Trump’s heretofore unseen 1995 tax return, which reveals that Trump declared a massive $916 million loss that year, which the paper describes as the result of “mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.”
Apart from proving that 1995 was a remarkably shitty year for The Donald’s business, what does that prove? Tax experts allege that a loss of that magnitude would have enabled Trump to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income in future – which means he might not have paid income tax at all in the following 18 years.
Trump issued a statement in response to the NYT’s findings:
Mr. Trump is a highly-skilled businessman who has a fiduciary responsibility to his business, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required. That being said, Mr. Trump has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes, sales and excise taxes, real estate taxes, city taxes, state taxes, employee taxes and federal taxes […] Mr. Trump knows the tax code far better than anyone who has ever run for President and he is the only one that knows how to fix it.
He’s right on one thing – there are a lot of people in America who won’t give a shit about this. But this isn’t the 2012 election. Many Trump voters – and others – are in a precarious economic position after the global financial crisis.
Under those conditions, a boisterous tax evader like Trump stops looking like a populist hero to the disenfranchised working class, and more like a rich dickhead who can’t manage his investments, but is rewarded regardless.
Oh, and the weirdest thing about this leak? It came to The Times from someone in Trump Tower.
Source: The New York Times.
Photo: Getty Images.
