Unfortunately, Trump actually is the PotUS until January of next year. (Barring something drastic - please, we’ve had enough chaos this year, I’m not looking for more crap hitting the fan.)
The tantrums still look awful.
“Too many Universities and School Systems are about Radical Left Indoctrination, not Education. Therefore, I am telling the Treasury Department to re-examine their Tax-Exempt Status…
… and/or Funding, which will be taken away if this Propaganda or Act Against Public Policy continues. Our children must be Educated, not Indoctrinated!”
When is he going to examine whether churches should have their tax exempt status taken away for indoctrinating their parishioners in radical right indoctrination?
C’mon Rick, you know it’s okay if a Republican does it.
Maybe / probably a dumb question, and a total hijack to boot (y’all get a twofer today!), but if Agent Orange’s taxes showed either of these wouldn’t he have been in deep shit well before now? He’s been a scam artist for decades and if he was going to cheat on his taxes or take bribes or whatever kind of illegal activity his return might show, I can’t imagine it started recently. Given that, why would the IRS have ignored it forever? If he’s involved in tax evasion he should’ve been nailed years ago.
If nothing else, this almost 4 year long argument should’ve prompted the IRS to at least take a bit of a deeper look at his taxes to see if anything shady was going on, I would think.
Personally, my guess WRT the tax return issue is that his taxes show the truth. Probably that he’s not quite as rich as he claims or something else rather unnewsworthy. But if there is one single thing that defines Trump it is his complete disassociation with the truth. He lies about Every. Single. Fucking. Thing. Everything he can, every time he can. Full stop. Remember when he claimed to have invented the phrase “prime the pump” right then and there in an interview? So stupid and mundane, but he just had to lie about it. No matter what is going on in the world or his life or hell, anything, he has to tell a lie to make either himself look better or someone else look worse.
And his tax returns would be right there, black and white, no real way to spin it. Just numbers. And numbers don’t lie.
So I think he doesn’t want them released not because they’re particularly juicy but because once they’re released he can’t control the narrative WRT his personal wealth and finances.
But what the hell do I know.
(Beginning of continued hijack)
The sad truth is, lots of rich people get away with tax fraud all the time. They have the means to hide their ill-gotten gains. The IRS is poorly funded and poorly manned. Their task force to examine fraudulent behavior is small.
Trump’s organization is privately held. That means no watchdog groups were paying attention to what he is/was doing. It’s those groups that draw attention to suspicious activity. There was no SEC oversight. No shareholder oversight. In the few instances where lay persons at Deusche Bank drew attention to irregular transactions, the instances were hushed up by their superiors and never reported for further investigation.
If an investigator at the IRS has no basis to subpoena the underlying records to do a deeper dive to learn if actual fraud is occurring, they take valuations mostly at face value and the records are never examined. This is the sort of tax fraud Trump and his family favor: Valuation games. Value high for loans, gifts and deductions, value low for tax assessments and sales. They scammed hundreds of millions of dollars in this way using shell companies and other evasive tactics over decades.
A very worthy article to read:
Even if the IRS suspected fraud, they may simply not have had the resources to go after Trump. It takes a fleet of forensic accountants to trace through all these rabbit warrens. The process is very time consuming and expensive. That’s the point of them.
But SDNY does. And so does Manhattan DA Cy Vance Jr.
TL;dr: No, Trump would not necessarily have been nailed years ago. As a privately held enterprise, it is far more likely that he never would have been, had he not been given the presidency by the Russians and made himself a high profile target.
(End of hijack)
Personally, I like the notion that he invented the word “fake.”
I am entirely all too aware of that fact, but I’m going by the rule of if it does not look like a duck, does not walk like a duck, and does not quack like a duck, I’ll be damned before I call it a duck.
I’ve said before, I have a fantasy of Donny Two-scoops sitting in a prison cell reflecting on how he could have gone on grifting a hundred thousand here, a couple million there, indefinitely but decided to take that escalator down June 16, 2015.
Yeah, I know he’s incapable of introspection. Like I said, it’s a fantasy.
What Aspenglow said! Also if past returns show lots of Russian cash when he was still a private citizen, it might not be illegal but it would further show how beholden he is to Russia. Not that that would make a damn bit of difference politically, it seems.
But Trump himself has repeatedly claimed that the IRS has his taxes under audit continuously for at least the past four years. Maybe I’m missing something, but that seems to imply that someone at the IRS is indeed carefully examining Trump’s tax records.
Of course, an important question is whether Trump is lying about the audit excuse. And the answer to that is: of course he is. Has anyone ever heard of the IRS taking more than four fucking years to close out an audit?
Trumps entire ‘business model’ is a shell game. I suspect that the IRS has a hard time keeping up with the latest con.
You’re expecting self-consistent logic from Trump? That’s cute.
Would not surprise me at all if the head of the IRS is replaced again, and soon. Hmmm. Perhaps Jared? Steven Miller is too busy writing a manifesto.
Well, no, I’m not expecting anything of the sort. Someday I wish he’d surprise me, but I’m not holding my breath.
This is how i’m hoping trump will surprise me:
The amount of legal and semi-legal shenanigans real estate developers are allowed is astounding, and I’ve no doubt that Trump and his organization has delved deeply into the mostly illegal and wholly illegal side of shenanigans. It’s a good business for it, because there really aren’t all that many convictions handed out unless one is tiny and can’t afford a (in)decent legal team. A lot of real estate development is a shell game, and their lobbyists keep it so.
No doubt you’re familiar with the old “set of two books” strategy, the one where you have a “legitimate” set of books for review by the IRS/banks/others, and then you have the real set of books, that represents the true state of your financial wealth. So you know which set of books the IRS is going to get when they audit Trump. The receipts and supporting documentation he and his accountant submit to the IRS will match what is represented in those books.
Since his is a privately-held business, who is going to alert the IRS to the real set of books? What basis would the IRS have to dig deeper into things like shell companies, faked receipts, money laundering and the like?
IRS audits are meant to determine that the income/expenses reported on a tax return can be matched to some legitimate – or legitimate-appearing – set of records. That’s it. Their chief concern is collecting tax, not running prosecutions. So…
Now let’s suppose that maybe the IRS pays as much attention to the news as the rest of us, and some regular IRS chief says to himself, “Say, maybe we should have a closer look.” What does Trump do? Oh, yeah.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/05/politics/irs-commissioner-charles-rettig-trump-taxes/index.html
Another firewall.
But now let’s imagine the IRS did discover criminal fraudulent transactions by the Trump organizations even before Trump could install his own guy. What must they do with it? They can’t prosecute it themselves. They have to turn it over to a federal US Attorney’s Office for prosecution. The one(s) in which the allegedly illegal transactions occurred. Like SDNY, EDNY or DC District.
Waitaminute… which offices was it again where Trump/Barr installed their own goons?
Trump has been protecting his tax records and resulting prosecution for them since forever. Being “president” has only made it easier for him.
For now.
Understood. My main point really concerned Trump’s ridiculous claim that his taxes are under some sort of eternal audit that is never resolved.
My apologies. I didn’t mean to talk down to you. I thought there was some genuine confusion.
Though I am positive that in normal times, Trump’s tax returns really are under an eternal audit. Probably every single year he files.
I’ve never understood why anyone accepts him being under an audit as a legitimate basis to not release his returns.
So now Trump is dissing his own supporters and saying that they are really working against him.
This poor guy is sooooooo persecuted.
So at the same time the trump admin is distancing themselves from Dr. Fauci, trump retweets several tweets from game show host and world-famous epidemiologist Chuck Woolery, talking right-wing BS about how the virus is overblown:
Chuck Woolery
The most outrageous lies are the ones about Covid 19. Everyone is lying. The CDC, Media, Democrats, our Doctors, not all but most ,that we are told to trust. I think it’s all about the election and keeping the economy from coming back, which is about the election. I’m sick of it.
Absolutely no leadership on the Covid pandemic as cases continue to skyrocket. In fact, not just no leadership, it’s like anti-leadership. This is going to get very bad.