His net worth has likely gone up a bit since he became president. But I wonder what his actual net worth was as of 2015 after subtracting debt from assets.
Big loans, inflated assets, modest annual incomes, little to no charitable giving. The man didn’t bankrupt casinos, defraud people looking for an affordable college degree and fail at selling meat online all as tax dodges.
It’s also possible he’s not hiding anything specific, and he just likes to pick fights because it plays well with his base. Fighting against the establishment and all that.
Oh no. He genuinely doesn’t want you to know his actual net worth.
I tend to agree that this is all it is. He had nothing to gain from releasing his tax returns for a job he never expected to get, and so he came up with the “I’m under a routine audit” excuse that played well enough with Republican voters and left it at that. And after he won, well, who cares at that point, he can just keep on not releasing them.
We’ve already seen enough of Trump’s returns to know that he sucks at business and doesn’t pay taxes, and that hasn’t hurt him politically (That makes him smart!), so it can’t be that he’s worried people will find out he’s not as rich as he claims. He’ll just say he hid his wealth from the government like all smart people do and Republicans will nod along in agreement.
And I’ve said in another thread that there’s not going to be evidence of money laundering, fraud, or Russian interests because none of that tends to show up on tax returns anyway. Tax returns are information that people willingly disclose to the federal government, if there was blatant evidence of crimes he’d already be in jail, so they tend to be as squeaky clean as possible.
No, anyone expecting a bombshell is going to be disappointed. Trump is fighting this because he has no incentive to cave. His voters don’t care if he doesn’t and he gets nothing from Democrats if he does.
I disagree, and think his fear really is this simple. (But that’s just my opinion, how can I know.) Anything else that has come out disclosing his poor business skills has been countered by him as being bullshit, lies and fake news.
Trump is two dimensionally deep, and he’s lied about his wealth, and his whole shtick is based on this lie.
If I have ties to Russia banks (like stock,etc) that would be on my tax return. But maybe a guy like Trump has a way to legally hide those ties.
I think a big part of it is that Trump thinks to himself, “I’m a big strong powerful man with good hair and big hands. Why should I tell you peasants anything?”
Maybe on some level he is hoping that some Democrat will take the Harry Reid approach and lie about having seen the returns. Doesn’t seem to have happened, yet. All we got is The New York Times publishing as shocking new revelations stuff that Trump put into his book.
Or maybe just he is sitting back and watching Democrats try to pass laws to exclude Presidential candidates from the ballot if they don’t reveal their returns. Then those laws will be struck down by the Supreme Court (if it gets that far) and Dems will add another layer of egg to their faces.
Rule of thumb: when your enemies are removing their shoes and socks, pointing a pistol at their instep, and saying “Ready…aim…” you don’t have to do anything but remind them that the safety is still On.
Regards,
Shodan
I haven’t had the privilege yet to read Trump’s entire literary oeuvre. In which book does he (through his ghostwriter) admit to being a billion-dollar loser, and sometimes America’s #1 money-losing taxpayer, over a span of many years while he pretended to be a wildly successful, self-made entrepreneur? Frankly, that sounds out of character for Trump, but I’ll defer to your scholarship on the matter…
I think you are mistaking what The New York Times said about the book with the book itself. Much the same thing as with Harry Reid - a lie is halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. The important thing is to control the narrative, if you can.
It works less well with Trump, because he doesn’t care. There’s been enough fake news about him that even another Harry Reid lie wouldn’t trigger anything new.
Regards,
Shodan
remember the money he lost was almost certainly money he got from other people, not his own money. Maybe a small part of it was his.
Trump does indeed like to travel. You got us there.
That could be part of it. But I think it’s more likely about how, in the Trumpian worldview, there’s no real concept of legal or illegal. Legal is whatever you get away with. Illegal is whatever your haters can use against you. A person like that quickly learns to hide everything and lie about whatever isn’t hidden.
I doubt he even knows what he’s hiding or feels ashamed about it. He just knows information about himself can be used about him, so he hides everything.
duplicate
For all their faults, the Republicans would already have the tax returns by now if the shoe were on the other foot.
Are you using “fake news” in the sense that Trump uses it, i.e., to mean something that is true but unflattering to him…Or, are you using it in some other sense?
Breaking: Where do we go from here?
“A federal judge in Washington D.C. on Monday ruled in favor of the House Oversight Committee’s bid to obtain President Donald Trump’s financial records from his accounting firm.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta also denied Trump’s request to stay his decision pending an appeal.”
Looks like the judiciary is getting fed up with Trump’s antics in trying to use them to slow walk what are likely to be inevitable rulings against him. I am particularly gratified that the judge denied Trump’s request for a stay. I hope Mazars acts today. I think they already have the materials ready to go.
Here’s a Washington Post article that goes into more detail, I know not everyone will be able to access it: