Well, at least we know that Donald Trump had a very good reason to fight so hard to obstruct the release of his federal tax returns. Yesterday, the New York Times broke the fascinating story about the very little (can you say minuscule) amount of taxes Trump paid over the past eighteen years. Here’s a link to the article “The President’s Taxes – Long-Concealed Records Show Trump’s Chronic Losses and Years of Tax Avoidance” (https://nyti.ms/3jcOoXW).

UPDATE: Here’s another link to a fantastic New York Times piece: “Charting and Empire: A Timeline of Trump’s Finances” (https://nyti.ms/3kWrBzT). This is an interactive chart that shows the various sources of Trump’s income for the years 2000 – 2020, as well as his losses each year.  Looks like he made good money from The Apprentice and real estate investment, but not much else.

While all the data will undoubtedly be sliced and diced and intensely viewed under the microscope for the next few weeks, one point is very clear already. Trump has always portrayed himself as a great businessman. The fact that he paid zero dollars in federal income tax in ten of the fifteen years prior to starting his campaign for the White House in 2015 clearly paints a different picture. While Trump will eventually say that he was just being smart and taking advantage of all the legal deductions and loopholes (paying taxes is for “suckers’ and “losers”), the magnitude of his losses and the $400 million of personal debt that he must repay soon certainly seem to point to the fact that he is a rather inept businessman.

Trump did clean up his act a little after becoming President. For 2016, the year he was elected, he paid $750 (not a typo) in taxes. For 2017, his first year in office, he also paid $750 (not a typo) in taxes.  That’s less than a family of four earning $20,000 would pay.

I hope that Biden can effectively capitalize on these revelations during the first presidential debate on September 29^th. Trump has already tried to label this as fake news and lies. Given that the tax returns were filed with the IRS, I think the only fake news is found within the information submitted to the IRS by Trump. Such blatant efforts to cheat the government out of tax revenue should give pause to even the most ardent Trump fans.  But it probably won’t.

Hopefully, the Democrats will be able to use this latest outrage to help boost donations in the last month before the election and register more voters shocked by Trump’s brazen behavior. There has been so much bad behavior by Trump over the past four years that we have all become desensitized to the endless, blatant violations of our trust in the president. While this latest “bombshell” just confirms what most reasonably intelligent people have suspected about Trump’s finances and business acumen, I hope it can still be shocking enough to energize the Biden campaign and supporters to pull out all the stops before the election.

Be sure to vote and encourage your family, friends, and neighbors to vote. Let’s all do our part to Dump Trump on November 3^rd.