A broad coalition of activists is agitating to force the release of Donald Trump’s tax returns, but it may turn out that the only way we’ll ever see his records is if someone leaks them to the media.
there is one piece of information that, if revealed, could single-handedly undermine Trump’s presidency before he is able to gain momentum: his federal tax returns.
A broad coalition of activists—which so far includes the leaders of the January women’s marches that galvanized five million people in cities across the country, MoveOn.org, the American Federation of Teachers, the Indivisible Project (which has inspired more than 7,000 local groups to organize, including protests at local town halls sponsored by members of Congress), Americans For Tax Fairness, the Center for Popular Democracy (a network of local community organizing groups), and Our Revolution (the organization built from Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign)—are planning a massive Tax March on April 15 to demand that Trump release his tax returns. They intend to walk from the U.S. Capitol to the White House, passing both Trump’s hotel and the IRS building. They also expect to organize marches in more than 60 cities across the country.
Marches, lawsuits, and demands from members of Congress can keep the issue in the public eye but they may not be enough to actually produce Trump’s tax documents. Perhaps the only way we’ll ever see his returns is if a courageous IRS employee, or one of Trump’s own lawyers or accountants, leaks them to the media, just as Daniel Ellsberg helped to bring down Richard Nixon by releasing the secret Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971.
Trump has adamantly refused to release his returns. He pledged to do so once the IRS had completed its audit. After the election, in early January, Trump repeated that claim: “I'm not releasing the tax returns because, as you know, they're under audit.”
That’s a bogus excuse. Under federal law, the IRS is required to audit the taxes of the president, but an audit does not prevent anyone, including the president, from voluntarily releasing personal tax information. President Richard Nixon made his tax returns public while he was still under audit. Since then, every major party nominee since Nixon (except Gerald Ford, who released a summary) has released his or her tax returns to the public.
With that excuse exposed, Trump changed his tune.
In late January, his spokesperson, Kellyanne Conway, announced that Trump will not release his tax returns under any circumstances, even after the audit is completed.
“The White House response is that he's not going to release his tax returns,” Conway said in an interview on ABC's This Week. “We litigated this all through the election. People didn't care,” she said. “They voted for him, and let me make this very clear: Most Americans are very focused on what their tax returns will look like while President Trump is in office, not what his look like.”
This excuse is also spurious.
In January, an
ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 74 percent of all those surveyed, and 49 percent of those who voted for Trump, said that the president should release his tax returns.
By the end of February, more than
one million people had signed a
petition on the White House website, launched on Inauguration Day, to “Immediately release Donald Trump’s full tax returns, with all information needed to verify emoluments clause compliance.” It was by far the largest number of names on a White House petition, surpassing a 2012 petition to recognize the Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group, with more than 387,000 signatures.
Trump obviously fears that the release of his tax returns could be an embarrassment and push his already low favorability ratings over a cliff. Even worse, the returns could provide ammunition to those who’d like to see him impeached.
Many Americans want to know: What is he hiding? Tax experts have identified four likely concerns.
First, Trump’s tax returns could reveal the extent of his global business dealings and entanglements, including potential conflicts of interest that violate the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which forbids presidents from accepting payments from foreign governments. Trump was required to file financial disclosure forms that revealed that he has a stake in or owns 564 businesses, corporations, limited partnerships, or limited liability companies around the world. Many of his businesses work in or with foreign countries, including Russia. Some of Trump’s business partners might be close to Putin. His tax returns might show that he’s making payments on loans from foreign banks and to who have invested in his businesses.
“Until we see his taxes, we don’t know how much money he owes Russia, China, and other countries,” said Ben Wikler, Washington director of MoveOn, one of the groups sponsoring the Tax Day marches.
Second, Trump’s tax returns might reveal that he isn’t as wealthy as he has claimed. During the campaign, one of Trump’s biggest arguments was that as a successful businessman, he could fix the nation’s economy and stem the exodus of jobs. As evidence of his business acumen, Trump claimed to be worth $10 billion. But Forbes magazine put the figure at $4.1 billion.
Trump’s tax returns might show that even that number is a wild exaggeration, that he’s mired in debt, and that the number of his businesses that have gone bankrupt is even more than the
six we already know about. (Despite this, on April 18, 2015, Trump tweeted this falsehood: “For all of the haters and losers out there sorry, I never went Bankrupt”).
Third, the tax returns might reveal that Trump has paid little—and in some years, none—in federal income taxes. If there’s one thing that most Americans
agree on it is that the super-rich should pay their fair share of taxes.
In a debate last September, Hillary Clinton scoffed at Trump’s failure to release his tax returns, suggesting that he may be hiding the fact that he paid nothing in federal taxes. “That makes me smart,” Trump responded.
In October,
The New York Times obtained and
released Trump’s 1995 tax records, which revealed that he claimed a $916 million loss that could have permitted him to avoid paying federal income taxes for up to 18 years.
The losses stem from major business failures, including his mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, the financial crash landing that was Trump Airlines, and his bungled purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.
After the Times story was published, Trump again sought to turn the revelations it into an indication of his business acumen.
“Mr. Trump is a highly-skilled businessman who has a fiduciary responsibility to his business, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required,” he said in a prepared statement.
In Trump’s logic, if a wealthy mogul with a good accountant can exploit tax loopholes created to help the super-rich avoid paying taxes, he has a moral obligation to take advantage of them. The statement didn’t mention that while enriching himself, Trump stiffed scores of unpaid contractors and bondholders on his casinos. In his statement, Trump even claimed that his experience manipulating the tax laws was a positive credential for a would-be president: “Mr. Trump knows the tax code far better than anyone who has ever run for President and he is the only one that knows how to fix it.”
Fourth, the tax returns might reveal that Trump gives little or no money to charity. Trump has long boasted that he’s a generous philanthropist. He often showed up at star-studded charity events to demonstrate his do-gooderism. On the same day that Trump announced he was running for president, he released a 93-page list of his charitable donations. The list included 4,844 individual gifts that totaled $102 million.
Washington Post reporter
David Fahrenthold spent months trying to confirm Trump’s claims. He called more than 420 charities on Trump’s list. Only one group, the Police Athletic League of New York City, said that it had received a donation from Trump—and that one was for less than $10,000.
Fahrenthold discovered that even the Trump Foundation, supposedly created as a vehicle for Trump’s charitable giving, is mostly a scam. Trump has given only $5.5 million to his own foundation and nothing since 2008. Meanwhile, Trump enticed others to contribute $9.3 million to the foundation. This helps Trump look like a generous donor without spending his own money. Moreover, Trump has illegally used the Trump Foundation for his own business purposes, a clear violation of federal tax laws against self-dealing. For example, his foundation’s largest gift—$264,631—was used to renovate a fountain outside the windows of Trump’s Plaza Hotel, hardly a charitable cause. In 2007, he used the foundation to buy a six-foot-tall painting of himself, for $20,000, which wound up hanging on a wall in Trump’s private golf club in Briarcliff Manor, New York. Trump has also used his foundation’s funds to settle legal disputes involving his for-profit companies, another violation of federal tax laws.
All this suggests that Trump is more Grinch than generous. But the full extent of Trump’s stinginess can’t be known without reviewing his tax returns, because donors are required to itemize their tax-exempt charitable donations on their annual IRS forms.
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