As Paul noted last night, MSNBC’s lefty host Rachel Maddow came up with a scoop: she obtained a portion of Donald Trump’s 2005 federal income tax return. On her show, she relentlessly hyped the coming revelation, which presumably helped her ratings. Unfortunately, the revelation helped only Trump: he paid $38 million in federal income taxes on an income of $153 million.
Everything about this is good for Trump. He is very successful, as he has claimed, and he pays plenty of taxes–25%, and $38 million is an enormous contribution to the federal coffers. Maddow’s fellow leftists were annoyed with her for helping Trump, to the point where I wonder whether the source of the leak may have been Trump himself. If it wasn’t, it should have been.
Trump’s gargantuan $38 million tax bill raises a longstanding question: can anyone ever pay enough taxes to satisfy a liberal? The answer is no. The New York Times, which speculated back in October that Trump may have paid no income taxes at all for twenty years, was unabashed. Speculation dashed on the rock of reality? No problem!
The Times hilariously headlines “Trump Wrote Off $100 Million in Losses in 2005, Leaked Forms Show”. Gosh, imagine how much he would have paid if his accountant hadn’t taken credit for the deductions allowed by the tax code! The Times is so twisted by hate that it is no longer capable of reporting a story straight. Sophisticated tax lawyers tell me that the Times’s analysis of the alternative minimum tax is wrong too. The reporters probably were just quoting talking points served up to them by the Democratic Party.
The Times is, at least, predictable. But I can’t explain why the Democratic Party sent out an email a little while ago, demanding to see Trump’s tax returns. Are they gluttons for punishment? Here is the email:
I dunno. I would guess that the Democrats have seen about all the Trump tax returns they want to. Why would they send this email to their faithful (and others like me) in the wake of the Maddow fiasco? Maybe they, like other MSNBC viewers, were convinced by Maddow’s promotion that a big revelation was in store, and scheduled this email to go out before her show aired. And then forgot to cancel it when her “scoop” fizzled.
In any event, most Americans are not reacting to the news that Trump paid $38 million in federal income taxes in a single year the way the Times and the Democratic Party (at risk of redundancy) did. I suspect the most common reaction was: Huh. The Democrats are wrong again.
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