Why the Trump Taxes Story Won’t Matter

The big New York Times piece on Donald Trump’s tax returns, obviously timed to feed Joe Biden some attack lines entering the first debate, is part of a campaign-season tradition. Unfortunately for Trump’s critics, that is a tradition of failure.

The story has two main thrusts. One is that Trump has had multiple years in which he paid shockingly little taxes, due to a variety of aggressive tax-accounting techniques. In a couple of years, his net tax liability was $750, less than a great many nowhere-near-wealthy Americans pay. A few of the details show Trump taking business expenses that are embarrassing, such as $70,000 for his hair on The Apprentice. The other is that Trump’s businesses have lost a lot of money over the years, belying his bravado about his fantastic success.

All of this might have been useful to those of us opposing Trump in the 2016 primary, and Democrats plainly share the same frustration that they did not have access to it during the 2016 election, despite Trump’s occasional promises to release tax returns (not that this stopped Democrats in 2012 from running with Harry Reid’s unapologetically false claims that Mitt Romney paid no taxes). It could have been helpful in puncturing some of Trump’s odd combination of braggadocio about his enormous wealth with man-of-the-people populism.