Tax bombshell throws Trump on defensive before debate
President Donald Trump reeled Monday on the eve of his first televised debate against challenger Joe Biden after a bolt-from-the-blue report showed he has been avoiding paying nearly every federal income tax for a long time.
The scoop from THE BRAND NEW York Times, reporting that Trump paid only $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017, and none at all for 10 of the prior 15 years, was a go to the jugular of the self-described billionaire.
Trump, who portrays himself as a hard-nosed businessman on a mission to drain the Washington swamp, dismissed the days story -- that your newspaper says is founded on examination of his long-secret taxation statements.
"The Fake News Media, exactly like Election time 2016, is mentioning my Taxes & all sorts of other nonsense with illegally obtained information," he tweeted Monday.
But with several new polls on Sunday once more suggesting Biden has the upper hand, the Republican goes into the debate in Cleveland on Tuesday ever more on the defensive.
A Washington Post/ABC News poll put Biden 10 points ahead of Trump nationally, at 53 to 43 percent support among registered voters, while an NBC News-Marist poll gave the Democrat a similar lead of 54 to 44 in key swing state Wisconsin -- which Trump had carried in 2016.
Trump's Democratic challenger is homing in on the president's handling of the coronavirus pandemic and his controversial rush to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the late liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
However the tax report threatens the core of Trump's political identity -- that vaunted capability to connect with blue collar voters.
Though its effect on voters was still unclear, the days report hands Biden piles of new ammunition.
And the Democrat's campaign immediately opened fire with an ad comparing typical tax payments by ordinary Americans, such as for example $10,216 for nurses, to that reportedly paid by Trump the entire year he took office: $750.
THE DAYS story raises new doubts about whether Trump is very the man with the Midas touch as he claims, or a hapless spendthrift owing a whole lot of people money.
He's the first president in years never to make his taxation statements public, claiming he can't because he's under audit.
In his trademark brash style, he also once boasted that getting away from taxes "makes me smart."
On Monday, he tweeted: "I paid many millions of dollars in taxes but was entitled, like everyone else, to depreciation & tax credits."
But based on the Times, Trump's taxation statements show he managed large-scale tax avoidance partly because his supposedly successful businesses -- specially the golf courses -- are such money losers.
The Times said that Trump benefited from a $72.9 million tax refund now at the mercy of an official audit.
He also reportedly took tax deductions on residences, aircraft and $70,000 in hairstyling for tv set appearances.
And in a detail that raises the issue of potentially serious conflicts of interest, the Times said that loans and debts of $421 million personally guaranteed by Trump are largely due for repayment in what would be his second term.
A former Democratic presidential candidate, billionaire Tom Steyer, tweeted that in 2017 he paid $32 million in federal taxes. Trump is "a cheat, and he stinks at business. In November he's going from the White House to the outhouse," he wrote.
Even without the fresh fuel of the tax story, Tuesday's Trump-Biden debate was destined to become a brutal affair.
Trump is intensifying his longtime smearing of his rival's mental state. One of his new catchphrases is that Biden "doesn't know he's alive."
And as the debate nears, Trump has said they should both take a drug test.
"Joe Biden just announced that he will not agree to a Drug Test. Gee, I wonder why?" Trump tweeted Monday.
When asked by reporters about the demand over the weekend, Biden laughed before declining to comment.
Trump on Monday tried to strengthen his claims that the federal government has responded strongly to the Covid-19 crisis, announcing the distribution of 150 million rapid tests that can deliver a bring about 15 minutes.
Over 205,000 persons in the us have died from the virus, by far the highest death toll on the globe. -- AFP
