Now that we’ve finally, definitively learned what we had long suspected – that a failed businessman ran for president simply to boost his battered brand and stave off bankruptcy; that he’s drowning in debt and clinging to the White House in order to hold off his creditors; that he’s been desperately trying to make money overseas in ways that undermine our national security – the obvious question is whether these well-documented revelations will move the needle politically and ensure his ouster.
Let’s first stipulate that they won’t matter a whit to his Kool-Aid brigade.
They will dutifully echo Trump’s Sunday afternoon decree that the whole thing is “fake news” from The New York Times (ignoring the fact that the reporters were working from actual documents, and that each line of their opus was vetted by a battery of lawyers), preferring instead to swim in the cesspool of Fox News, which last night barely mentioned the revelations at all.
The MAGA cultists will think it’s awesome that Trump didn’t pay any federal taxes in at least 10 years, and that he paid a mere $750 in 2016 and again in 2017, because they wish they too were “smart” enough to stiff the IRS the way he did. And remember in 2015 when Trump boasted, “I’m the most successful person ever to run for the presidency, by far. Nobody’s ever been more successful than me”? The cultists will still believe that.
But for the rest of the electorate – which will hear a lot about Trump’s taxes tomorrow night, during the first debate – it’s likely that His Fraudulency will look like a lyric in a Beatles song: “I’m a loser / and I’m not what I appeared to be.”
To summarize The Times’ investigation of his tax returns – the first of many articles, by the way:
“(H)is finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed…The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the IRS portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.”
This is ultimately a national security story – as president, he has inked licensing deals with authoritarian regimes; he has paid far more in taxes to foreign countries than to Uncle Sam – but most everyday Americans (outside the cult) are likely to boil down its essence to this easily graspable factoid:
Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes.
If you bought a new refrigerator, that was more than Trump paid in taxes.
If you bought a Lenovo laptop, which is nothing special, that was more than Trump paid in taxes.
If your dog needed serious dental work, the vet’s bill was more than Trump paid in taxes.
If you bought a decent timing belt for your car, parts and labor were more than Trump paid in taxes.
The macro comparison is even worse. The average citizen in swing-state Pennsylvania pays $6289 in federal taxes each year. The average nurse in America pays $10,200. Folks like that may not feel kindly toward a failed businessman who contrives to parlay massive losses into a tax payment of $750. If Joe Biden was still looking for a populist issue that appeals to the everyday working stiff, this one arrives on a silver platter.
Or put it this way: Trump in 2016 paid $129,250 more to Stormy Daniels than to the United States government. What a patriot.
Something else worth pondering: Since Trump keeps claiming massive losses in order to avoid paying federal taxes, while inflating his revenues and assets on bank documents in order to obtain loans (according to Michael Cohen’s sworn testimony), isn’t that the very definition of fraud? If we throw him out of the White House, we’re more likely to get that question answered.
But hey, if everyone is busy talking about how he’s a money-losing tax-dodging deadbeat, they’re not talking as much about his criminally negligent complicity in killing off 200,000 Americans. For Trump these days, that’s what constitutes an upside.