There is a history among presidential candidates of releasing multiple years of tax returns, a process we had seen play out countless times in the past, but never really paid attention to until one candidate very famously refused to release his — Donald Trump.
That is to say, he refused to, after agreeing to, after refusing to.
In January of 2016, before Trump was even officially the Republican nominee for the nation’s highest office, he was clear about his intentions — or at least, as clear as we have become accustomed to with Trump:
I have very big returns, as you know, and I have everything all approved and very beautiful and we’ll be working that over in the next period of time.”
Now, if it struck you then as odd that he might call something as ho-hum as a standard tax return “beautiful,” perhaps over the course of the last two years you have noticed that when Trump uses adjectives, it’s most generally in an effort to fill the uncomfortable space around what he isn’t saying. In this case, what Trump wasn’t saying was that by May, when he accepted the nomination, he would be shutting down the idea of him releasing his taxes once and for all.
Although Trump went back and forth on would-he-or-wouldn’t-he a few more times, one man actually had an opportunity to see Donald’s tax returns more than a decade ago as part of a lawsuit (that Trump of course lost). After Trump sued him for libel in a suit that was dismissed seven years ago, Timothy O’Brien wrote at length about the importance of America having that same opportunity.
Of course, he can’t talk about what he saw in there — a court order prevents him from discussing it, and it took some serious legal wrangling to even get his hands on unredacted versions of the tax returns in the first place. But in an article on Bloomberg, O’Brien argues that there are multiple legitimate reasons that Trump should be forced to release the returns, and some are now underscored even more by the fact that Trump seems financially beholden to a hostile foreign power after his behavior in Helsinki over the weekend.
- They would show his income: This may actually be the biggest reason he hasn’t released them — he’s told the world how much he’s worth on multiple occasions, and many times he is contradicted by reports from those with a reason to know, like the report that came out in Fortune after Trump’s FEC filings in 2016.
- They would show whether he’s used offshore accounts or other tricks in order to avoid paying taxes. Skipping out on your taxes wouldn’t be very patriotic, after all.
- His business activities would be out in the open. Presumably a tax return would show something like, say, $65,000 in income paid by taxpayers to one’s own golf course in Scotland. And after Helsinki, it’s probable that if he had dealings in Russia that influenced his behavior there, it would be reflected in a return.
- Overall transparency would be much higher. It is assumed by many that whatever it is that Putin seemingly has that he’s holding over Trump’s head, it’s something that looks a lot like keeping the Trump Organization afloat with loans. After all, Trump is friends with a lot more Russian bankers than the average Moscow Circus bear.
Will Trump ever release his taxes? It’s doubtful. Unless they’re subpoenaed during the course of the Mueller investigation, it’s pretty likely that nobody is going to lay eyes on them, and even then, a court order similar to the one binding Mr. O’Brien would likely be in effect unless Mueller could prove some public interest after the fact.
Still, it would be, in Donald Trump’s words, beautiful.
Featured image via Donald Trump’s Twitter
