Trump’s Unhappy Returns We advised in 2016 that he release his taxes. Now others will do it for him.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-unhappy-returns-11601333853?mod=opinion_lead_pos3
The New York Times has spun out 10,000 words claiming that Donald Trump paid little or no income tax for many years. The Times says it can’t release the actual tax documents lest this compromise its sources, and Mr. Trump denies paying so little but won’t release his returns.
Voters can decide whom to believe, but one fact to note is that the story doesn’t assert illegal behavior. The IRS presumably signed off on the Trump returns, except in one case in which it is disputing a $72.9 million deduction claimed by Mr. Trump. This is a fight rich people have with the IRS all the time, often ending in Tax Court.
The report makes much of a deduction Mr. Trump took for business consulting fees that match payments his daughter Ivanka reported in separate filings. There may be legitimate reasons for those fee payments, and Ms. Trump ought to clear the matter up.
Is it a scandal if Mr. Trump legally exploited the tax code’s treatment of chronic business losses to pay little tax? Hardly. Mr. Trump admitted this himself in a 2016 debate. Congress littered the code with loopholes aimed at assisting real-estate businesses, among others. Democrats write a tax code to please their corporate donors and then selectively attack CEOs or businesses that use the loopholes.
The story also claims that Mr. Trump’s empire is under financial stress and rising debt. This may be true, but the reporters can’t seem to decide if Mr. Trump is a shark exploiting the White House for personal gain or a sap who is bleeding cash while in office. Brilliant or bumpkin? Make up your mind.
The report’s timing is no accident coming in the final weeks of the campaign and two days before the first presidential debate. Moderator Chris Wallace may feel obliged to ask about it, and Joe Biden will pound away on the claim of low tax payments. The Times says it will have more such stories in the coming days, and who can doubt it? The press and most of official Washington are all-in to defeat Mr. Trump.
On this point, the President has made it easier for his opponents, as he often does. Mr. Trump danced his way through the 2016 campaign with promises to release his returns followed by claims that he couldn’t do so because of an audit. We advised him to do it in the public interest, but there’s no legal obligation for a candidate to release his taxes.
By refusing to release his returns in 2015 when he first entered the race, Mr. Trump has given every reporter, every Democrat in Congress, and every swamp denizen an incentive to make the returns into a Holy Grail of transparency. Mr. Trump stonewalled Congress’s patent fishing expedition on the returns, and the Supreme Court gave him a legal reprieve for a while.
But that increased the incentive to leak and publish the returns, or some version of them, close to the election. Mr. Trump could have controlled the political narrative by releasing his tax returns on his terms and timetable. Now his opponents will do it.
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