We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes. Leona Helmsley.
So, Donald Trump doesn’t pay taxes.
This is the same Donald Trump who tweeted an attack on then President Obama, criticizing him for “only” paying the legal 20.5% of his income in taxes.
I consider the wild accusations that Trump is always hurling at people to be a form of confession. I think he accuses people of doing what he is, in fact, doing himself.
That idea has proven out where Trump’s taxes are concerned. When he accused Obama of not paying enough taxes, he was, in fact, not pay any taxes himself. He’s a jerk. And a liar. He’s phony as the proverbial three dollar bill.
A case in point is his claims of being soooo rich. It turns out that what he is in reality is a man who has been running a credit shell game. Long before 2016, he’d gotten himself so leveraged that he’d become too big for the banks to let fail.
His massive loans were assets on the banks’ books. But if they called those loans, and Donald couldn’t — as everyone knew that he could not — meet the call, why then, the loans would move to the deficit column in the bank’s ledger. The Trump debt was so big that turning it into a loss could push some banks into insolvency and would weaken the financial position of any bank.
Thus, our boy had become too big to fail. He could jet around on his private jet and live high on borrowed money and keep the old shell game moving.
When American banks got wise and stopped loaning him money, he simply switched to the not-yet-so-wise German banks. Enter Duetsch Bank and a pile of loans and debt that, like the dead skunk in the middle of road in the old song, stink to high, high heaven.
If Trump’s former fixer/attorney has his facts straight, the numbers that Trump used to give himself enough assets to justify those loans were seriously inflated. On the other hand, the numbers he gave on those same assets when it was time to pay taxes on them were seriously deflated.
I know this will shock Trump’s loyal followers, but Michael Cohen has said under oath and in writing and just about everywhere he has a microphone that Trump lied. He lied to the feds on his taxes. He lied to the banks on his applications for billion-dollar loans.
If this is true — and all I know is what I read in Cohen’s book and heard in his testimony and television interviews — then we are getting into a serious go-to-jail, do-not-pass-Go, do-not-collect-$200 situation. This isn’t something we know for dead certain. But it’s quite a bit further down the road than speculation.
It has been testified to under oath and written about in print by a man who was in a position to know what he is talking about. It is also a fact that, other than calling Cohen names and trying to use the Justice Department in an underhanded attempt to block publication of his book, Trump hasn’t had much to say about it.
What we do know with a high degree of certainty because of the New York Times story that broke yesterday, is that Trump doesn’t pay taxes. He pays less American income tax than a high school student with a part time summer job as a waitress at the local hamburger joint. In the year he jetted around the country on his private jet to win the presidency, I paid many times more taxes than he did, and I was a retired grandma who was put-putting down the road in my 5 year old Honda Fit to my cancer treatments.
When I say we know that the New York Times story is true, I mean that. We can trust that we know it’s true.
The way we know it’s true is that Trump’s only answer to the story was his tired old rhubarb, “It’s ‘fake news.’”
If the New York Times had gotten this wrong, he would already have filed the lawsuit. You can’t just make up a story like this and print it, not about anybody. Even a president can sue if someone says something that is as factually inaccurate, damaging and easily refuted as this would be.
If Trump’s tax returns show that the New York Times story is wrong, he wouldn’t be yipping and yapping about “fake news.” He’d be nailing them to the wall.
I believe that the story about his taxes is true. When his only comeback was blathering about “fake news,” he pretty much admitted it was true.
He doesn’t pay his taxes.
He is insolvent.
He’s a liar and a phony.
The big question that remains to be answered is whether or not Michael Cohen is telling the truth about the criminality of the thing. Did Trump lie on his tax returns? Did he lie on his applications for loans from banks?
If I was betting, I would let my money ride on Cohen’s testimony. Trump has not sued Cohen for testifying, writing in a book and repeating over and over again in interviews that the President of the United States has lied about his taxes and on loans. He has done nothing to refute the written evidence Cohen gave to Congress.
I watched Cohen make this charge in an unequivocal fashion during a news interview just a few weeks ago. He was absolutely clear about it. This isn’t a nebulous he said/he said deal. It’s not a vague wink-wink innuendo with no way to prove or disprove the facts of it. There’s nothing fantastical about it.
It’s about written down, documented and completely verifiable facts. It’s part of a legal paper trail that runs across two continents and involves some of the wealthiest and most powerful entities in the Western world.
All Trump has ever had to do is release his taxes and the papers on those loans. If he was clean, the whole thing would fall down flat and die right there.
But he hasn’t done that. What he has done instead is fight releasing these documents with everything at his disposal.
Trump fought the release of his tax returns all the way to the Supreme Court and then fought it with spurious lawsuits for months after he lost there. I think he did this because he’s guilty. I think he knew that the same documents that would clear an honest man would expose him for the crook that he is.
Now his tax returns are finally out and we can all see that his brags don’t have a word of fact in them. They’re just brags. We also can see that he pays many times more money to silence porn stars than he pays in taxes.
The only question that’s left is whether or not Michael Cohen is lying about the felonies. We now know that Trump doesn’t pay taxes. He leaves that to little people like us.
I think the reason Trump hasn’t done anything besides call names, whine about how badly he’s treated, and try to block publication of Cohen’s book is because Cohen is telling the truth.
We know that our billionaire president doesn’t pay taxes. We also know that his house of wealth is riddled with debt and insolvency. We have better than hints that there’s much uglier stuff hiding in these numbers, just waiting for someone with a calculator to add up the numbers and connect all the dots.
I have a feeling that the picture it’s going to make will be downright ugly.
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