The House Ways and Means Committee released six years of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns on Friday.
The release makes clear what had been rumored for years regarding Trump’s staggering business losses, painting a much different picture of his business and financial acumen.
The reality, from the tax returns, is that Trump, whose political appeal was based on his supposed prowess as a businessman, got back more in a one-time tax refund than he paid in income taxes over the six-year period, as he claimed tens of millions of dollars in business losses.
This after the committee released two reports last week that found that the IRS had failed to audit Trump during the first two years of his presidency as required, and in fact did not initiate its mandated audits of the former president until House Democrats made a formal request that the agency do so in 2019.
Trump, you may remember, had resisted the release of the returns because he claimed that he was under an active IRS audit.
His decision not to release his returns during the 2016 presidential campaign was a break with tradition in which candidates for the White House had routinely released their tax returns in a nod toward public transparency.
It’s now obvious why he didn’t want public knowledge of his mounting business failures, though on Friday, the former president, master gaslighter that he is, issued a statement in which he argued that the tax documents “once again show how proudly successful I have been and how I have been able to use depreciation and various other tax deductions as an incentive for creating thousands of jobs and magnificent structures and enterprises.”
In fact, Trump and his wife, Melania, used massive business losses to declare negative income in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2020, the total negative income for those four tax years standing at $81.3 million.
The Trumps paid $750 in federal income taxes in tax years 2016 and 2017, and paid $0 in 2020, and actually claimed a refund of $5.5 million that year.
Trump, of course, doesn’t like that we now know this.
“The Democrats should have never done it, the Supreme Court should have never approved it, and it’s going to lead to horrible things for so many people,” Trump said in his statement on Friday. “The radical, left Democrats have weaponized everything, but remember, that is a dangerous two-way street!”
What’s being implied there is that Republicans, who are set to take control of the House of Representatives next week, will try to play the Hunter Biden card as a wedge against President Joe Biden.
“Going forward, all future chairs of both the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee will have nearly unlimited power to target and make public the tax returns of private citizens, political enemies, business and labor leaders, or even the Supreme Court justices themselves,” Texas Republican Kevin Brady of Texas, the ranking member on the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement on Friday.
“This is a regrettable stain on the Ways and Means Committee and Congress, and will make American politics even more divisive and disheartening. In the long run, Democrats will come to regret it,” Brady said.
Wealthy people who have used their wealth and privilege to, like Trump, avoid IRS scrutiny will also come to regret the attention being paid to the tax avoidance schemes used by the former president and others like him.
Don Beyer (D-VA-08), a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement on Friday that the release of the Trump’s tax returns show that the former president “abused the power of his office to block basic transparency on his finances and conflicts of interest which no president since Nixon has foregone.”
“Trump acted as though he had something to hide, a pattern consistent with the recent conviction of his family business for criminal tax fraud,” Beyer said. “As the public will now be able to see, Trump used questionable or poorly substantiated deductions and a number of other tax avoidance schemes as justification to pay little or no federal income tax in several of the years examined.
“These findings underscore the fact that our tax laws are often inequitable, and that enforcement of them is often unjust,” Beyer said. “Trump was able to bypass even the mandatory IRS presidential audit program for years, but many other wealthy and powerful people evade billions in tax dues every year through more quotidian tax avoidance.
“Congress has so much work to do to make tax enforcement in this country fairer, and that will continue to be a major priority for me as a member of the Ways and Means Committee going forward,” Beyer said.
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Chris Graham
