Thanks to the leaked tax returns, we now know that:
a) Trump didn’t pay income tax because some of his companies were recording losses
b) His companies were recording losses in order to avoid the income tax (something that every business tries to do)
¯(°_o)/¯
What’s over? The charade?
Well no, according to Cnn & company he’s clearly finished. Because reasons.
Probably a permanent banner at the Huffington Post since the day he rode down on an escalator. Bombshell report, beginning of the end.
Disclaimer: the “it’s over” banner isn’t today’s homepage in the Huffpost, but the way the tax return leaks were reported had the standard:“Trump is finished, he’ll never recover” litany that is used on and on by the usual media outlets.
Remember when Maddow received Trump’s tax returns from a few years back and it turned out that he paid something like $30m in taxes the previous year? She nearly cried on air and I wondered if somebody near Trump had leaked them to her.
For this, I sort of wonder the same. They have records from the period that Trump literally (pre-2016 definition here) wrote a book on. Losing billions then gaining it back was the premise for his show. Records from the 1970s or early 2000s could have been interesting but hyping that he was nearly broke before he earned it back isn’t really as damning as people appear to believe it to be.
It will go down in history as being as one of the most anticlimactic live coverages ever.
I think in the Us there was a journalist who did a live show during which he was going to open the car drawer of a gangster or something, and it was hyped as potentially revealing amazing secrets about that criminal’s life, and then it turned out that in the drawer there were just a bunch of meaningless papers. What was it? I can’t remember the journalist name and who the car belonged to.
Geraldo Rivera and the Capone vault if I’m not mistaken
That was it! Bloody Geraldo.
I mixed the real event (Geraldo and the vault) with the spoof scene in UHF where the guy opens Al Capone’s car locker and there are road maps.
you are correct.
it made him somewhat famous, like the saying, any publicity is good publicity
Honestly I’m starting to not care about Trump’s tax returns. It’s starting to seem like a feeble attempt to dethrone him. The election meddling I was concerned about, but what rich guy wants the public pouring over his/her tax returns?
If a vindictive porn star with huge knockers couldn’t take him down, I doubt a bunch of old tax returns can.
The walls, boss, the walls - they are closing in … 
And now we know why tax returns won’t prove that Trump is corrupt, compromised, or a tax dodge.
As any American who has ever owned a business or even itemized their tax return knows, adjusted gross income is to personal income as a bark is to a bite. Goes double for biz income. There is zero incentive to report all income; AGI is always less than real income and often barely recognizable.
All that will be accomplished is more headlines like “IT’S OVER”, which is obviously the goal.
IMAGINE WHAT WE DON’T KNOW!
Edit - Good grief - this site won’t let me post the above statement?
If you like your billionaire president hiding his financial details behind a veil of secrecy, be my guest.
Nobody wants that, but that doesn’t mean that veils will fall away if personal tax returns are released to the public.
I know it may seem to non-Americans like making tax returns public will increase candidate transparency - and for W2 and other sources of income it may - but not for an American whose business is commercial real estate, licensing, and whatever else Trump has his hands in. An American with a very high income has every legal incentive to report legally a loss.
For example, some losses can be carried forward and used to offset income for years in the future. If an American can legally report a large loss it’s a bit of a jackpot.
Also, there is no 1099 or W2 that will list anything like “V Putin” as an income source. Just saying.
Reporting a loss is not illegal if there really is a loss. What’s wrong with reporting a loss and making that public ?
Tell that to the Democrats. He did report the loss, and even wrote about it in his book. The Dems are just grasping at straws at this point.
No, reporting a loss is not illegal if it’s legal. Reality is another subject altogether.
What Democrats want to achieve here is to show that Trump has income from real estate transactions that in effect laundered money for Russians.
That’s not something that can be proved through tax returns alone.
What can be done, though, is to gather the reported income figures, compare them to Trump real estate holdings and sales in the relevant time periods, and then speculate openly on what laws Trump broke. Accuracy in that speculation is relative since Trump is a public (and now political) figure. Trump is unlikely to sue for libel since that’s not an option open to a public or political figure. Equally good would be to report (and re-report, and then editorialize upon) something that would cause the IRS to launch another audit.
That’s the endgame here. It’s just an attempt to gin up another political smear.