Talking about the Don’s 2005 tax return??? Come on. It may be a bit more relevant if we are talking about his 2015 return !
Great investigative journalism here. Surely something that the public needs to be informed about.
I don’t know, it was kinda obvious when he refused to release them years ago that he was hiding something. Either something to do with his success as a businessman, or patriotic duty as a taxpayer, or both. Anyone who still doesn’t see him as a fraud and grifter at this point probably never will. The clever ones have shifted from defending the indefensible Trump to going after the easier targets that are Joe Biden and the far left crazies
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So far the tax revelations seem pretty uneventful. 6000 pages to work through, though.
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The way people were going on I thought they expected to find the holy grail, or at least confirmation Trump was in cahoots with Putin.
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The numbers, so far, seem very small. Was 51k to kids a business loan or a gift, doesn’t feel particularly controversial.
Probably small because he wasn’t taking a salary as President. The despicable man.
He was taking the 400k salary, but then donating it.
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At the moment it feels rather unexciting. His daughter was doing business in China, IIRC, so him having a bank account there doesn’t seem unreasonable. But, it’s the headline.
What was their reason for needing to look at them anyway?
Of course not surprising they just release them to the public after whatever use for them they had, which I’m a little unclear of.
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As you know it’s politics. He’s a dodgy rich geezer, as I’ve no doubt rich Dems are as well.
Perhaps a discussion regarding tax laws would be more pertinent. I don’t see any “great investigative journalism” in the article.
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I’d expect rich people to have bank accounts ask over the world. Only something like North Korea should raise eyebrows.
Apparently he donated 0 in 2020
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It appears so. 2020 seems a bit of an oddity. Looks like his businesses performed particularly poorly that year, although I doubt 400k would have made much difference.
Maybe he refused to give to charity out of spite? It wouldn’t be out of character.
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If you are a rich guy with accounts around the world why lie and say your China accounts are closed? Why say being audited when no audit for those years? When lie about items which are not illegal then leads people to believe will lie about illegal items.
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He has a track record of lying a lot, or at least being obscure in his answers. I recall he said he thought the China account had been closed down after saying it had been. It’s his standard MO.
I still don’t see any smoking gun coming through with his tax returns. My feeling is he was embarrassed about them revealing his poor business performance. It’s just his ego.
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It may just have been, why do something you don’t have to? He didn’t have anything to gain from it except looking presidential, which he didn’t care about anyway. Probably something his lawyer told him.
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It’s not easy to judge how someone is doing by looking at their taxes.
For example we used to sell off our clients loser stocks to offset their income. On their tax returns it could look like this dude is not making much money but his overall wealth in assets could be growing in unrealized gains and we just sold off his losers to free up money to make more money.
I don’t know his businesses well enough and each industry has its own way of handling how to be tax efficient. There is a reason the IRS admitted they don’t go after the wealthy because their taxes are too complicated.
It could be he had some bad years but I wouldn’t judge too much without understanding the whole picture. I’m guessing they will be combed through more and more, but I don’t envy anyone looking at pages and pages of this stuff. I would rather shoot myself.
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You know more than I do, but it seems strange why he was so adamant in not disclosing his taxes. At this point in time, at least. The Chinese bank account that people are latching onto doesn’t feel that bad to me.
His performance as a businessman is of little interest to me.
Lawyers always recommend their clients say/disclose as little as possible. Understandably.
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