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(CNN) – It was the moment when the fabulism of the “Art of Business,” the bragging of the billionaire mogul, and the populist standard for Donald Trump’s forgotten Americans was revealed as what it had always seemed: a sham.
An impressive revelation of The New York Times on the president’s tax returns on Sunday revealed a woefully inept businessman and serial tax evader crushed by massive debts that could expose him to conflicts of interest given his position as president and his power to help undisclosed lenders. .
Trump declined to discuss his tax returns and criticized the report from The New York Times as “totally fake news” on Sunday.
But the article portrays the anti-elite crusader who criticizes a corrupt system as if it was actually using its loopholes to avoid paying federal taxes in 10 of the last 15 years starting in 2000 by writing off its own staggering losses.
In 2016 and 2017, Trump paid just $ 750 in federal income taxes – far less than many Americans who are working hard in the middle of a deep recession to stay afloat.
Trump took huge deductions, including $ 70,000 to care for his hair.
And he also appeared to write off hundreds of thousands of dollars by paying his daughter Ivanka as a consultant to the Trump Organization, according to the report by The New York Times.
The story also reveals the extent to which Trump’s status as president is being used to prop up his losing companies – his Washington hotel and golf courses, for example.
LEEWARD: The New York Times: Trump Paid No Income Taxes In 10 Of The Last 15 Years Starting In 2000
“A scammer in the White House”
“He’s a con man in the White House,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told CNN on Sunday.
He was referring to a president who broke convention by refusing to release his tax records to the public while running for office.
Tony Schwartz, who wrote Trump’s book «The art of business“He said that even he was surprised by the” sheer impudence “of Trump’s behavior.
And he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that he revealed the “kind of mind that would think ‘I can get away with it without paying taxes on hundreds of millions of dollars in income.’
The publication of the article with deep reporting, based on more than two decades of its tax information obtained by The New York Times, occurs just two days before the first presidential debate.
And 37 days before an election in which he is behind Democrat Joe Biden.
It represents a serious challenge for a presidency that we now know Trump might need to preserve to outcompete creditors with hundreds of millions of dollars in loans due soon.
It leaves the president facing multiple questions about his morals, behavior, and patriotism as he appears to be paying more taxes to various foreign nations than to Uncle Sam.
The report also raises the possibility that Trump’s misleading accounting, which is already the focus of several investigations in New York, could expose him to serious legal trouble when he leaves office.
The report of The New York TimesFor example, it says the president has been wrestling with the Internal Revenue Service for years over whether the losses he claimed should have resulted in a staggering $ 73 million tax refund.
Debate opening for Biden
In the short term, the report of The New York Times gives Biden a golden opportunity to put Trump on the defensive during his first debate in Cleveland, Ohio, on Tuesday night.
In recent days, Biden has tried to undermine Trump’s good approval ratings in economics by calling the election a contest between Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was born, and Park Avenue.
Trump’s complicated and selfish tax arrangements play directly into that construction.
While the president’s most loyal devotees may not be affected by such an attack, it’s hard to see how it doesn’t hurt him among wavering blue-collar voters in the post-industrial heartland of states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which are crucial in the Straits. Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes
LEEWARD: ANALYSIS | How Biden is pushing a two-front war against Trump
Biden’s campaign communications director Kate Bedingfield told CNN on Sunday that the report clarified the contrast between the president and the Democratic candidate.
“You have in Donald Trump a president who spends his time thinking about how he can get out of paying taxes to fulfill the obligation that all other working people in this country fulfill every year …
“With Joe Biden you have someone who has a completely different perspective on what it means to be a working family in this country,” Bedingfield said.
Key figure
The key figure, that Trump paid only $ 750 in taxes in two consecutive years, could be the most damning, since it is so identifiable and offers such a stark comparison to the higher figure that almost all Americans pay.
If a man with his own airliner, gold-leafed houses, and a string of golf courses can get away with it, who can argue that the system is not hopelessly biased against ordinary people?
«I tell them that there are people out there, and I know it, I come from workers, workers, these people are fighting to earn a living. They will wake up and find this incredible mogul paying $ 750, ”said former Republican Ohio Governor John Kasich, now a CNN political commentator.
What your excuses are, I don’t care. It fails the smell test. It will not totally affect the people who were there for him. It’s the people on the fence, ”said Kasich.
Within hours of the report’s release, the Biden campaign had already put up vinyl stickers for sale on its website that read, “I paid more income tax than Donald Trump.”
Hold on to power
The report also sheds some light on the president’s clear desperation to cling to power.
He, for example, stepped up his false claims Sunday that Democrats were trying to steal the election, making a fresh, fact-less assault on mail-in ballots that he said are riddled with massive fraud.
The New York Times reports that within the next four years, more than $ 300 million in loans will mature, for which Trump is personally responsible.
That opens up the extraordinary possibility that lenders may be asked to decide whether to foreclose on businesses owned by the US president while he is in office if he cannot pay the money back.
Therefore, Trump is in danger of being deeply compromised.
His personal debts also underscore a longstanding fear about his administration: that he is wielding US diplomacy to prioritize his own personal and financial goals over national interests.
Trump, for example, makes millions of dollars in revenue from countries like Turkey and the Philippines that are run by autocrats, whom he has praised but which violate traditional US values like human rights.
And while he has paid little federal taxes to the Treasury, the president or his companies have paid more taxes to foreign powers, including $ 145,400 to India and $ 156,824 to the Philippines in 2017.
Trump supporters will likely remain undaunted
With the election so close, the president must spend every day trying to destroy the credibility of the Democratic candidate.
Even as he tries to escape the consequences of his disastrous management of a pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 Americans and is gathering steam again.
But the article on your taxes can challenge even a skilled distraction artist like the president.
Trying to deviate from the report The New York Times, at a press conference Sunday Trump promoted his new Supreme Court candidate Amy Coney Barrett.
And he issued another requirement that Biden take a test for performance-enhancing drugs before the debate.
However, given Trump’s strong emotional and tribal connection to his supporters, his success in constructing alternate political realities while discrediting journalists, and conservative media propaganda, October’s surprise bombing may have less of a political impact. immediate than expected.
Stories of Trump’s refusal to pay his creditors, casino bankruptcies, and morally questionable business practices have been circulating for years and did not stop him from winning in 2016 or tarnish his self-made mystique as the tough real estate shark that portrayed on NBC’s “The Apprentice.”
LOOK: Trump and Biden prepare for the first debate before the November elections
Tumultuous career
Throughout a tumultuous political career, Trump has rarely paid a price for scandals, outrages and insults, any of which would have doomed a normal politician.
His brand is well known: he is a rule breaker.
And in the past, he has explained that avoiding taxes shows that he is a smart businessman and is an approach anyone would take if they could.
On Sunday, Trump quickly adopted his trademark tactics to try to pass off the hugely serious disclosures as nothing to worry about voters.
This is fake news. This is totally fake news. Invented, false. We went through the same stories, you could have asked me the same questions four years ago, ”the president said, again inaccurately saying that he couldn’t release his tax returns because he was under audit.
“I mean the articles I read are so fake. They are so bogus, ”he said, claiming to pay a lot in taxes.
Trump Organization attorney Alan Garten told The New York Times that “most, if not all, of the facts appear to be inaccurate” and requested the documents.
