Trump's Excuse for Not Releasing His Tax Returns Is Ludicrous

     

                                                                                                                                                                                                  Tuesday being Tax Day, it's an apt time to remind everyone that not only is President Donald Trump breaking with decades of tradition in refusing to release his tax returns but that his reason for doing so is ludicrous and that the whole exercise is stupidly self-defeating.
While Trump has been, ahem, inconsistent about his willingness to release his taxes, he has been fairly steadfast in his reason for not doing so – he claims that his returns are under audit by the IRS.
But this excuse is, not to put too fine a point on it, utter nonsense. Let's for a moment take him at his word (and given both his credibility and refusal to release even so much as an audit letter, there's not a reason in the world to do so) and assume that he is in fact under audit. That's not actually a reason to decline to release his returns. Per an IRS statement from more than a year ago, "nothing prevents individuals from sharing their own tax information." In fact President Richard Nixon released his tax returns when he was under audit.
So Trump cannot even reach the subminimal standard of transparency set by Tricky Dick. Trump saying he won't release his returns while under audit is like my refusing to discuss my lunch because I'm still digesting; both arguments involve loosely related sets of facts, but lack any actual logic-based connection.
As my friend Jack Farrell, author of the New York Times bestseller "Richard Nixon: The Life," says: "It takes considerable evasiveness, arrogance, or paranoia – or maybe it's just plain scandalous behavior – to rival Richard Nixon on the secrecy front but, well, there you have it."
Is there any chance that's going to change any time soon? White House spokesman Sean Spicer, in ritually regurgitating the "audit" excuse Monday, was asked if we can't just admit that Trump's never, ever going to give up his returns, audit or no. "We'll have to get back to you on that," Spicer replied. That's the political equivalent of Don't call us, we'll call you. It's a non-answer in service to a farcical excuse all meant to distract from an old-fashioned stonewall.
The "audit" excuse is so risible that conservative Sen. Tom Cotton drew boos in ruby red Arkansas when he trotted it out at a town hall meeting Monday.
Indeed, this is where Trump's obstinacy goes from being stupidly self-serving to potentially damaging for his party's and his own prospects. Spicer tried to dismiss this Monday when he argued that "the American people understood when they elected him in November." They don't care, in other words, a variation on a talking point Trump himself has employed. But this is whistling past the graveyard – and not just because the American people voted for someone else.
Poll after poll (after poll after poll) has indicated that most Americans want Trump to release his returns. And it's an issue that's generating intensity, judging by the protests that sprang up around the country this past weekend.
As conservative opinionator Jennifer Rubin wrote in The Washington Post Monday:
"This will be one more item — along with conflicts of interest, filling his Cabinet with Goldman Sachs alumni, violating the emoluments clause — that Democrats will use in the 2018 midterms. The argument is simple: Trump is more secretive, more indifferent to corruption than his predecessors — and Republicans are too meek and unprincipled to object. Trump's conduct cries out for divided government; without it, his contempt for clean, transparent government grows with each passing year."
And beyond the broad question of general principle, this could develop into a very specific political issue as well. As The New Republic's Brian Beutler points out, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen's term runs out in November and his departure "will create a major new conflict of interest for Trump, and, one imagines, a huge political problem for congressional Republicans: If we take Trump at his word that he's been under continuous audit for a long time, he can't be entrusted with the obligation to nominate a new commissioner."
The politics matter here. The more potent this issue becomes the more it becomes self-fulfilling, right up to the possibility that it becomes a main Democratic talking point in a successful bid to flip either the House or the Senate. That happening in either chamber remains a long-shot – Democrats have many more vulnerable Senate seats to defend next year than do Republicans, and the House battlefield is also unfriendly – but it's not out of the question.
If Democrats retake either chamber, they will have the power to subpoena Trump's taxes. And even if they don't, there are other avenues available to them. At some point, Rubin writes, "the investigation into the Trump team's association with Russians, either the intelligence community or members of the House or Senate intelligence committees likely will want access to the tax returns and/or other financial records. After all, how can investigators determine the extent of ties between the Trump campaign and the Russians without examining financial records (up to and including tax returns) of the candidate?" Or New York could arrange to release Trump's state taxes (h/t Hot Air's Allahpundit). The more this issue builds, the more pressure there is to find some way to get the information.
Even if you put aside the electoral politics of it, there's evidence that it's hurting Trump's agenda. As The New York Times' Alan Rappeport wrote Tuesday, Democrats are increasingly promoting Trump's obstinacy as a reason to block any tax reform he pushes. And not unfairly: It seems reasonable for the public to know the extent to which a president's proposed tax overhaul would benefit himself and his family. And, Rappeport points out, "more than a dozen Republican lawmakers now say Mr. Trump should release" his returns.
All of this makes the big question that much more tantalizing: What is Trump hiding that he's willing to put his position so much at risk?
There's actually a danger here for Democrats, as Moira Donegan writes in The New Republic: "The problem with using the tax returns as a symbol for all of Trump's corruption is that the returns themselves may be less than earth-shattering." Suppose – as Occam's razor suggests – that Trump has merely been lying about the size of his bank account, that he's merely a super-wealthy millionaire and mediocre businessman instead of the super-duper-wealthy billionaire and business wiz he styles himself? Suppose the returns don't show him as being in hock to Russia or other foreign entities? Is it possible Trump's really playing a long game here to whip his opponents into a frenzy and then deflate them?
Such strategic thinking does not, ahem, seem to be a Trump strength.