Donald Trump Barely Pays
Any Taxes: Will Anyone Care?
September 28, 2020
Three enterprising reporters for the New
York Times published a bombshell report Sunday evening on Donald Trump’s financial
life, making it clear that the President of the United States is a desperate,
cash-hungry grifter who paid no federal income taxes at all in ten of the
fifteen years leading up to his run for office and has, in his frenzied quest
to stay afloat, “propped up his sagging bottom line” by exploiting his office.
Readers learn that
Trump, who inherited an immense fortune from his father, found countless ways
to squander his capital. And, like his old man, he also found countless ways to
short the government, including, according to the Times, paying his
daughter Ivanka legally dubious consulting fees. At the same time, Trump has
accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars in debt that he must soon repay. He
is an almost comically inept businessman; he is the sum of his debt and
bankruptcies. Nearly everything he touches turns to lead. Were it not for his
investments in Trump Tower, “The Apprentice,” and little else—and were it not for the tireless ministrations
of his accountants—he would likely be on his back. The question is: Will anyone
care?
Readers inclined to
think of Trump as a liar and threat to national well-being will doubtless
relish every detail in the Times report, not least because it
confirms, with documentary evidence, what so many have always suspected and
what reporters such as Wayne Barrett and Tim O’Brien were writing decades ago:
that Trump is a shady and conniving operator whose practices betray contempt
for everyone from his contractors and employees to the federal government.
The Times article is hardly the first to provide evidence of
Trump’s grift, but its details are particularly numerous and galling. Moreover,
it comes two days before Trump’s first debate with Joe Biden and five weeks
before the election. Are there undecided voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida,
Georgia, Wisconsin, and beyond who will come upon this new information and
finally say to themselves, “This is too much. No more,” and not vote for Trump?
It’s hard to know.
The President’s reaction
to the story was entirely predictable: deny, deflect, and cast blame elsewhere.
Accompanied by his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, he came to the White House press room
shortly after the story dropped and attacked the Times (“Everything
was wrong; they are so bad”) and the Internal Revenue Service. The Twitter
storm saying that he was only playing by the rules of the game is sure to
follow.
Trump has long been
convinced, as he so memorably put it, four years ago, that “I could stand in
the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,
O.K.?” And it is probably true, that for many of his supporters, his
character—the dishonesty, the bigotry, the incompetence—is a given. It’s “baked
in,” as the Washington cliché has it. No matter what Trump does, no matter what
journalists go on revealing, he has, for the “base,” delivered on his promise
to upend “the system” and inflame the élites. Some supporters believe that he
has lowered their taxes (he hasn’t), defanged North Korea (he hasn’t), and
ironed out the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (he hasn’t). For the Republican
leadership, Trump remains tolerable because he appoints right-wing judges and cossets corporate interests.
A reader of the Times bombshell,
then, can reasonably ask, how is this different from the last bombshell?
How is it different from the memoirs by Mary Trump and Michael Cohen? From calling fallen U.S. soldiers “suckers” and “losers”? From all the generals, intelligence officers,
and government officials telling Bob Woodward in “Rage” that Trump poses a threat to national security
that is even more grave than anyone imagines? Four years ago, Tony Schwartz,
Trump’s ghostwriter for “The Art of the Deal,” told The New Yorker’s Jane
Mayer, “I genuinely believe
that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility
it will lead to the end of civilization.” This might have seemed overheated at
the time—the result of a former collaborator’s guilty conscience—and yet, in
Woodward’s new book, we read of Secretary of Defense James Mattis sleeping in
his clothes at night for fear that he’ll have to race back to the office
because the needless war of words between two erratic leaders, Trump and Kim
Jong Un, might lead to an unspeakable conflagration.
The Times story
does not make for breezy reading, particularly for a reader without a legal or
accounting degree. This is hardly the fault of its authors. It is, by nature, a
knotty unloading of many years of murky tax schemes, byzantine business deals,
devious agreements with foreign partners, and complex legal maneuvers. And yet
the reporters, Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig, and Mike McIntire, begin with a
memorably simple paragraph:
Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income
taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he
paid another $750.
The second paragraph is
similarly terse: “He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15
years—largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.”
For years, Trump has
advertised himself as a sui-generis brand of populist—the kind who somehow has
golden bathroom fixtures, mansions, and private aircraft—and yet pretends to be
the champion of the working and middle classes. Perhaps it is also “baked in” that
many of his admirers enjoy his sense of spectacle and contradiction. It is hard
to imagine, though, that every Trumpist—or, more important, every undecided
voter in the swing states—will relish hearing that he paid, while in office,
seven hundred and fifty dollars in federal income taxes. That is a stark
number. How many teachers, nurses, grocery clerks, farmers, factory workers,
bus drivers, truck drivers, and countless others will find that acceptable? How
many will fail to compare it to their own tax bill?
Trump knows that he has
certain factors on his side. As a demagogue, he is a master. He also operates
in a modern information universe in which long, complex investigative articles
are often ignored, distorted, or turned on their head. On Sunday night, while
Anderson Cooper was talking with a panel on CNN about the details in the Times,
Mark Levin, on Fox News, was interviewing Mike Pompeo about the many-splendored
wonders of Trump’s foreign policy. The Fox News Web site responded to the Times article
with the headline “Everything Was Wrong”—meaning, for millions of readers and
viewers, that the news was not the evidence or the charge; the news was the
dismissive reaction of the autocrat.
So who cares? How much
do these near-daily bombshells change anything? The election is the only way to
know. Trump, whose shamelessness knows no limits, seems intent on distorting
that process as well.
David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since
1998 and a staff writer since 1992. He is the author of “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.”
