Trump’s Refusal to Release Tax Returns Is a Ticking Time Bomb for the GOP
Some Trump delegates and their alternates should write him an open letter demanding his unredacted tax returns. If he declines, they should declare they will abstain on the first ballot of the convention, driving him below the number needed to nominate. The delegates should not give Republicans a time bomb that could help take down GOP control of the House or the Senate, or both.
.. “What will you do if the returns come out as part of an October surprise?” Trump was asked. Trump pondered the question and replied, “I’ll say they aren’t mine.” That stunning answer is the essence of Donald Trump.
.. But while Donald Trump has made a life out of bluffing his way past problems and cavalier comments, it’s harder to succeed doing that at the presidential level.
.. The answer could lie in Trump’s 40-year business career, during which he has assembled an empire of great complexity along with a record of serial credibility problems. In other words, he often “makes stuff up.” This is a man who said under oath, in a 2008 deposition in an ultimately failed $5 billion libel suit Trump launched against Timothy O’Brien, a reporter for the New York Times at the time: “My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings.”
.. A New Jersey superior-court judge concluded that Trump was an untrustworthy source of financial data on himself. That decision was upheld by a three-judge appeals court, which noted that the “materials that Trump claims to have provided to O’Brien were incomplete and unaudited.”
.. So it’s no surprise that, for example, Trump listed a New York golf club he owned as being worth $50 million. But in a lawsuit over the property, he told a judge the very same club was worth only $1.4 million.
.. Then there is charity. “It is possible that his tax returns will reveal that he is not generous generally, or not generous specifically with respect to causes — like veterans — that Mr. Trump suggests he supports,” Wood wrote. Trump might also have problems with overseas tax shelters.