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News / Opinion / Columns

Estrich: Anger justified about Trump’s taxes

By Susan Estrich

Published: January 8, 2023, 6:01am

After years of legal skirmishes, court battles and the rest, the House Ways and Means Committee finally released former President Donald Trump’s tax returns last week. It didn’t make front-page news because they had already been leaked. Even so, we should be mad as hell.

Unlike every president and presidential candidate, Trump refused to disclose his tax returns. With reason. He didn’t pay his fair share. He didn’t donate his fair share. He got away with murder. But we knew that.

In 2017, the first year of his presidency, he paid more in foreign taxes than in U.S. taxes — $750 in U.S. taxes compared to nearly a million in taxes for business income or activities all over the world. In 2020, he paid nothing at all. Zero dollars. How about that? No wonder he fought so hard to hide.

This is where Trump has been doing business: in Azerbaijan, Panama, Canada, India, Qatar, South Korea, the United Kingdom, China, the Dominican Republic, United Arab Emirates, the Philippines, Grenada, U.S. territory Puerto Rico, Georgia, Israel, Brazil, St. Maarten, Mexico, Indonesia, Ireland, Turkey and St. Vincent.

The list goes on.

According to the reports, Trump had foreign bank accounts between 2015 and 2020, including an account in China between 2015 and 2017. Yes, this is the same Trump who claimed that Biden was a puppet of China.

Trump bragged that he donated his presidential salary to charity every year. But his tax returns showed no charitable donations in 2020.

Not a dime to charity that year. Why not?

There are all kinds of other curious things in the thousands of pages of documents being reviewed by congressional committees, New York prosecutors and reporters everywhere. The Joint Committee on Taxation, which reviewed the returns, noted that Trump claimed to have received significant interest payments on loans to his children that the committee wrote might be a sign that Trump was disguising gifts.

But will any of this matter to the 30 percent or 40 percent of Americans who will stand by this man no matter what outrage he commits? The release of the actual documents hardly triggered a firestorm. Trump denounced it. Happy New Year. More of the same.

If Chinese bank accounts and doing business in Qatar (all while being president) isn’t even the least bit disqualifying, if paying less in taxes than I do doesn’t even raise an eyebrow, then maybe we need some new threshold for presidential candidates — like a commitment to upholding the Constitution, which would also eliminate Trump from consideration.

The Republican Party is being held hostage by the right. It has been captured.

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