There are important things on a tax return. But this was not a complete tax return. It was missing a hundred pages possibly. Maybe a thousand. No diff? Really?
The reason you need to see them is not because he signs a sheet incriminating himself in a crime. It’s because the data, statements, knowledge gleaned by other means, etc. is important to criminal investigations.
I’ll keep watching this stuff, with interest. You’re welcome.
Maddow blames her viewers for being disappointed. http://bigstory.ap.org/article/5c46d02a56f24645bbbca1c2158a4591/maddow-people-disappointed-trump-story-expected-too-much
I will say, she’s being accused of “overhype” when all she did was send out two factual tweets. I’d be a bit irritated too.
So you do not think the intent of the tweets was to fire up hype? Oh, please. Of course it was.
[QUOTE=article]
Maddow told the AP that she never misrepresented what she had.
“Because I have information about the president doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a scandal,” she said. “It doesn’t mean that it’s damning information. If other people leapt to that conclusion without me indicating that it was, that hype is external to what we did.”
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, disingenuous. Too bad. There’s ways she could’ve spun it big but with more integrity.
Of course it was, just like all her other tweets that promote her show but somehow doesn’t earn a SDMB thread from disappointed viewers. :rolleyes:
However, it wasn’t Maddow who blew this up into a “He is GOING DOWN” frenzy on Twitter. She’s not responsible for peoples imagination.
Too late to add: In her 2nd tweet, she said she had his 2005 1040. In the show, she had the 2 pages of his 2005 1040.
I mean, how is that “overhyping” what was being reported?
There was a lot of hype, to my mind. MSNBC and CNN have gotten into “count-downing” shows and topics and this fed into that. “We have his TAX RETURNS!!”
The whole reason I started this thread is that as I watched the lead-up to the show, I was realizing there was very little there, but that the lead-up was more buzzy than “very little there” would warrant.
No big deal, but I was struck by the disconnect. And since Maddow is a person I respect who markets her brand based on integrity, it didn’t seem consistent with her approach.
The second one seemed more like something intended to tamp down the hype.
bolding mine
Well, sure it was. You have to look at the whole thing in context, and that context is that Maddow (like other MSNBC hosts) made the Trump Tax Returns into a Very Big Deal throughout the campaign.
On the occasions when I saw her show, she certainly spent a chunk of time implying that SOMETHING WAS LURKING in Trump’s tax returns: he didn’t actually earn very much, he didn’t give anything to charity, he would be forced to disclose business ties he didn’t want people to know about, no one knew for sure. But whatever it was, it was going to be big, and it was going to be damning.
So when she said she had a tax return, it was reasonable for people to believe that she had something that was going to be big, and something that was going to be damning. Because she herself had laid the groundwork for that over the previous year and a half. To blame it on viewers and excessive expectations is not, let’s be honest, very professional.
She, the NY Times, Trump in not releasing the things (and lying about this topic), CNN, NBC, ABC, etc have made a big deal of the Trump tax returns. Why does Maddow deserve especial scorn for announcing she has a 1040?
And when she said he had a 1040, well, I’m not fantastically rich myself, but my taxes are complicated enough for me to understand the 1040 is largely a summary of innumerable schedules, forms, etc. Perhaps it’s a knowledge/experience thing, but I didn’t go into the show thinking she was going to blow the whole thing wide open - she only had a 1040!
This. Americans have come to expect extraordinarily high standards of wealth from their presidents and presidential candidates; from the beginning, with Washington and Jefferson they chose metaphorically the fattest guy in the room. For the next couple of generations they couldn’t match that so well until the Gilded Age; after which FDR and JFK.
Recent candidates from Romney to McCain to Hillary, have been insanely rich by the average manual worker family 's standard, and although very cleverly Trumpo beat her like a gong spending only half the amount she lavished, being less desperate than she, he will be punished if the dumb masses discover he’s a piker.
Contra: he’s a brilliant practitioner of the American art of Tall-Talking, handed down from the frontiers — perhaps the best there ever has been — and he might just say: “Sure I said billions when it was millions, what the fuck do you jerks care ?”, and they will lap it up.