A Word on Taxes
Benjamin Franklin once said that “in this world nothing can be certain, except death and taxes.” Every year is a stark reminder of this fact. People perish, loved ones go, and when times get as tough as they can, the tax collector squeezes the rest of life out of you.
This tax season, we, the American people, have been offered a treat. Well, it is more of a morsel, or a tidbit, or an insignificant crumb. Last evening, an “anonymous” source leaked Donald Trump’s tax returns, the very tax returns the people have been clamoring to see for months. Of course, it was only one year’s tax return (2005) and was an incomplete tax return, but it was something, what that something is, we have yet to determine.
I must say, this release has stoked more questions about our President’s finances than extinguished. For one, there is the nature of the leak. The tax return was delivered to a reporter in an unmarked envelope. That isn’t the suspicious part. What is suspicious is that the documents within the envelope were marked “client’s copy”. This implies that the leak is not somebody from the Internal Revenue Service, but rather from a source within Trump’s inner circle. What is further suspicious is that the envelope only contained two pages of the tax return, the 1040. If someone were to go through the trouble of securing Trump’s tax return and leak it to the press, would they not also leak the full tax return? And why stop with just the 2005 tax return? Why not other, more relevant years, like 2015, 2014, or 2013? It is as if Donald Trump himself released this tax return, presumably because it showed him in a favorable light and would further distract people from the real issues of his administration.
Further evidence that points to Trump or somebody close to him being the source of the returns is that prior to Rachel Maddow unleashing the return to her faithful viewers, the White House took the thunder away from by releasing the returns themselves, but only releasing the very documents that had been leaked in the first place. How would they have known to what extent the leaks had encompassed if they had not been the original harbingers of the leak?
Now, these was just the 2005 returns. This was no other year, and certainly no year that would bear a significance on what his situation was like going into the election. It tells the American people very little information in the way of what is going with Trump’s finances. Sure, we do now know what his income was that year (150 million) and we do know that he did pay taxes that year (35 million), but that is about it. We know nothing of the charitable donations he has said he makes or has made (and we have yet to see any evidence that indicates he is as charitable as he says he is). We know nothing of his business dealings with foreign entities. We know nothing on if, and to what extent, he has been financially compromised by foreign governments. We don’t know where his money is coming from or where it is going to. This release has answered nothing.
This presidency has been mired with scandal from the very start. Despite what Mr. Trump will have his loyal supporters believe, these controversies are not the product of a fake and misleading media. Rather, these are entirely constructs of his very own administration and its lack of transparency. The constant lies perpetuated by his mouthpieces, the blistering attacks on anyone that dares to question his administration, the dangerous allegations meant as a diversionary tactic away from his administration’s own faults. It is through these actions that Donald Trump has created and sustained the very controversies that seek to undermine his entire presidency. If he were to remove that veil of secrecy, if he were to open up and accept the critiques, if he were to just be honest with the people he is leading, all of this controversy, this scandal, these conspiracy theories would melt away. Unless, of course, there is something that he is hiding that he doesn’t want the American people to know about. In which case, we will continue to dig and to prod until we get to the truth.
The truth will set us all free.
