After years of legal skirmishes, court battles and the rest, the House Ways and Means Committee finally released President Donald Trump’s tax returns recently. It didn’t make front-page news because they had already been leaked. Even so.
We should be mad as hell.
Unlike every president and presidential candidate, Trump refused to disclose his tax returns. With reason. He didn’t pay his fair share. He didn’t donate his fair share. He got away with murder. But we knew that.
In 2017, the first year of his presidency, he paid more in foreign taxes than in U.S. taxes — $750 in U.S. taxes compared to nearly a million in taxes for business income or activities all over the world. In 2020, he paid nothing at all. Zero dollars. How about that? No wonder he fought so hard to hide.
This is where Trump has been doing business: in Azerbaijan, Panama, Canada, India, Qatar, South Korea, the United Kingdom, China, the Dominican Republic, United Arab Emirates, the Philippines, Grenada, U.S. territory Puerto Rico, Georgia, Israel, Brazil, St. Maarten, Mexico, Indonesia, Ireland, Turkey and St. Vincent.
How much did you pay in 2017? How much did you pay in 2020?
Why aren’t we mad as hell?
The list goes on.
According to the reports issued on Friday, Dec. 30, Trump had foreign bank accounts between 2015 and 2020, including a bank account in China between 2015 and 2017. Yes, this is the same Trump who claimed that Biden was a puppet of China.
Trump bragged that he donated his presidential salary to charity every year. But his tax returns showed no charitable donations in 2020.
Not a dime to charity that year. Why not?
There are all kinds of other curious things in the thousands of pages of documents being reviewed by congressional committees, New York prosecutors and reporters everywhere. The Joint Committee on Taxation, which reviewed the returns, noted that Trump claimed to have received significant interest payments on loans to his children that the committee wrote might be a sign that Trump was disguising gifts. That raises the question of whether “the loans were bona fide arm’s length transactions, or whether the transfers were disguised gifts that could trigger gift tax and a disallowance of interest deductions by the related borrowers,” the JCT said in its report.
But will any of this matter to the 30% or 40% of Americans who will stand by this man no matter what outrage he commits?
The release of the actual documents hardly triggered a firestorm. Trump denounced it. Happy New Year. More of the same.
This is the year when the Republican Party must face up to the challenge of Trump. Will it?
If a candidate came on the scene with a resume like Trump’s — a sleazy billionaire with a reality show past, tax returns that wouldn’t withstand scrutiny, tweets that wouldn’t either, prosecutors on the prowl — one would hardly be lining up consultants, but that is where the Republican Party is, at least until further notice, and even the tax returns don’t change the narrative.
Although they should.
If Chinese bank accounts and doing business in Qatar (all while being president) isn’t even the least bit disqualifying, if paying less in taxes than I do doesn’t even raise an eyebrow, if getting sued for rape doesn’t cause you to break stride (that was also last week or the week before for Trump), then maybe we need some new threshold for presidential candidates — like a commitment to upholding the Constitution, which would also eliminate Trump from consideration.
The Republican Party is being held hostage by the right. It has been captured.
