The Democrats have spent seven years trying to “expose” all the “criminal” activity in Trump’s tax returns, but now that they have finally gotten their win, it turns out there is nothing to see.
The Democrats very quietly released Trump’s tax documents late on Friday night and during a holiday, no less.
The truth is, if the Democrats had anything to pin on Trump, the documents would have been released with great fanfare during a weekday so that the full weight of the compliant press could line up to attack.
But the release day and time is our first clue that there is nothing whatever in the documents that could hurt Trump in any serious way.
“Democrats speculated that Trump must have been hiding something, and fantasized about what his returns might show. But when MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow published a 2005 tax return showing he paid $38 million in income taxes, she was widely mocked,” Breitbart News wrote.
In light of the nothingburger of a release, mocked was the right reaction.
The six years of newly-released returns, covering the years 2015 through 2020, show that Trump paid a total of $4.4 million in federal income taxes over that period, with an adjusted gross income of -$53.2 million. “The Trumps paid some form of federal taxes every year, but they reported income-tax liability of $750 or less in three of the six years,” the Wall Street Journal noted. Democrats point to some potential problems. They claim that Trump’s tax returns as president were not properly audited by the IRS (a claim the IRS disputes). They also complained about charitable deductions and whether loans to his children should have been taxed as income.
However, there appeared to be few bombshells. In a statement on Truth Social, his social media platform, the former president said the returns showed “how proudly successful I have been” and warned that “the Democrats should never have done it.”
The only thing we, as a nation, ended up with is a dangerous precedent of outing the personal finances of private citizen.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston, or Truth Social @WarnerToddHuston
