The New York Times’s blockbuster report on President Trump’s tax returns answers some big questions we’ve been asking for years. But in some ways, it’s less than surprising. During a 2016 debate, Trump responded to a report that he had paid no income taxes for a couple of years by saying, “That makes me smart.”
He said earlier in the year, when he was still pledging to release his tax returns, that people were “going to be surprised at how little I pay. I fight like hell not to pay a lot of tax. And you know what? Every politician probably does.”
Trump has at times tried to argue that however much he might exploit the tax system, it merely shows how broken the system is. We’ll have to see whether that’s an argument voters accept after the Times’s report shows just how much Trump has sought to exploit that system. Continue reading.