Trouble for Trump on tax ahead of opening presidential debate

Just over five weeks remain until the next United States president is decided and the current occupant of the Oval Office, Donald Trump, is having a double-whammy of Monday Blues.

Yesterday the New York Times published President Trump’s tax returns for the past twenty years. We can safely say that they do not vindicate the entrepreneurial skill or integrity of a self-described “winner” of “big deals”.

Records submitted by Trump to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS – the American HMRC) appear to reveal a net loss of $175m from his business ventures since 2000, subsidised by lucrative TV and merchandising contracts such as Trump’s appearance – ironically enough – as a hyper-successful tycoon on The Apprentice.

Aside from the commercial losses, a second blow came through cold figures on Trump’s federal income tax receipts, totalling just $750 in 2016, the year Trump took office. For many years prior to this the president paid no income tax at all.

To top it off, the report highlights how family members, such as Trump’s daughter Ivanka, helped lower the family’s tax bill through offshoring income in the form of “consultation fees” and other payments.

The fraudulence will not be lost on Trump’s opponents. For them, this is further grist to a long-churning mill. Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghost-writer and the man behind his 1987 business-romp-cum-biography The Art of the Deal, claimed to reveal the man’s personal and professional bankruptcy in a series of acerbic media events following his election. In 2018 he described his former associate as “a poor person’s idea of what a rich person should be”.

But now that image of fraudulence, once easily dismissed as the grumblings of disgruntled employees, is backed up with hard figures. You can read the full report here.

And a bad weekend for Trump was made worse by the news that Brad Parscale, former Trump campaign manager, has been sent to hospital after threatening to self-harm. Parscale was dismissed from Trump’s election team in July following poor turnouts at a rally he had organised. Speaking to The Guardian in January, he said he saw himself “as kind of a CEO, as a business leader.”

It seems Trump was able to recognise grandeur in others, at least.

But as recent polling reveals little movement in his direction and swing-state leads for his Democrat challenger, Joe Biden, Trump has tried to distract from the weekend’s news by retweeting Biden gaffes and a recent investigation into voter fraud in Minneapolis, district seat for Democrat Congresswoman Illhan Omar.

So there is mud on both sides ready for slinging at tomorrow’s first live debate between Trump and Biden in Ohio, scheduled for 2am Wednesday UK time. And Trump has never been one to care for proportion: his capacity to brush down scandals of this sort is remarkable.

Come Tuesday, the president will undoubtedly be back in the attack seat. This contest is only going to get uglier.