Part of an occasional series examining President Trump’s progress against Candidate Trump’s promises.
The promise: Candidate Trump will release his tax returns:
“We’re working on that now. I have 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,” the billionaire real estate developer and entertainer said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” [Politico, 1/24/2016]
However, he claimed he was under audit and therefore could not release them.
Results So Far: No recent tax returns have been released, although a decade of tax returns from the 1980s and 1990s were obtained by – not released to – The New York Times. As a voter, I consider this to be little more than an historical curiosity, and not a fulfillment of the obligation he assumed through his promise.
With regards to Candidate Trump’s claim that being under audit prohibits their release, the IRS Commissioner has since corrected Trump’s understanding of the matter:
… the president’s IRS commissioner, Charles Rettig, told lawmakers there are no rules prohibiting taxpayers under audit from releasing their tax information. [ABC News, April 10th, 2019]
And, in an apparent reversal of position, or, for those of us who regard this particular promise to be sacred, the breaking of a sacred vow, Trump advisor Kellyanne Conaway stated there would be no release of tax returns, as noted in this partial transcript of an interview:
After repeatedly promising to release his tax returns, Donald Trump has definitively reneged on that commitment. “He’s not going to release his tax returns,” presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway said in an interview on ABC’s This Week yesterday. “We litigated this all through the election. People didn’t care. They voted for him.”
A clamor for those tax returns, in the form of legal actions, have been raised by opponents of the Trump Administration. Steve Benen of Maddowblog provides a recent list of these actions here. For our purposes, we can take this list and break them into three categories.
The first are actions of Congress. Representative Nadler (D-NY), as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has asserted that he has the right to request the Trump tax returns as part of an investigation into violations of the Emoluments Clause. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin declined to honor the request, and the issue is now in court.
The second are new State requirements for Presidential candidates filing to be on the ballot. California has led the way in this category, but, as of this writing, a judge has blocked enforcement of the requirement.
The first two categories are arguably political in nature, meaning partisans will take their positions on the issue according to their predilections, but the third category can not be so easily dismissed. In connection with the alleged payment of hush money to silence certain women for having sex with President Trump, a grand jury has agreed to a request for the Trump tax returns by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. This is a serious matter, as Matt Stieb points out:
Unlike previous subpoenas, this one is in the context of a criminal investigation with a sitting grand jury, making it more difficult for the president’s lawyers to dodge this filing with a lawsuit.
And making it non-political.
The Bigger Picture: Voters will have various reactions to the status of the candidates’ tax returns. In most election years, nearly all of the voters won’t have an interest; most rely on non-partisan third parties to interpret the tax returns, as most of us are not facile with the complex tax code.
But it’s important to note how candidate Trump differed from all of the other viable candidates in the 2016 race. His rivals from both parties were, with a couple of exceptions such as Fiorina, politicians, campaigning on their political accomplishments, imagined or otherwise, their promises, and the connections they managed to create with voters. Candidate Trump also campaigned on promises and his connections with voters, but when it came to accomplishments, he denigrated his rivals’ political accomplishments, which often seem to be less accomplishment and more half-assed failures, thus leaving them with little to offer the voter, at least the voter who cannot accept that sometimes the best accomplishment is the compromise.
As he had no political accomplishment to offer, Trump substituted his business acumen as the accomplishments for voters to evaluate. I do not accept such a substitution for reasons I’ve delved into at length, but for those voters who have, there is a critical question: how much of his claims are true? Voters who’ve kept up with media reports are well aware that many questions have been raised concerning his success as a business leader.
But if he is the success he claims to be, his tax returns should reveal that his talk matches his walk. For the serious, sober voter who worries about the competence of our leaders, if one of them claims to be a great business leader, verification, as with any leader, is a necessity, and so the tax returns become an unexpected key to evaluation of candidate Trump.
Thus, Trump’s failure to fulfill this promise is a great disappointment. Indeed, the article quoting Conaway also provides a timeline of the various comments made by Trump and his representatives on the issue, and it’s hard not to see this as a matter of stringing the voters along until he had the base hooked, until they didn’t care.
But he still has more than a year to fulfill that promise, and if he has been the great business leader he claims, it’ll be a great rebuff to his opponents. But as each day passes, legitimate suspicions grow that his acumen is inferior.
