It’s those people on the fence,” Kasich said. It’s not going to disrupt those people who were for him totally. John Kasich, who is now a CNN political commentator. “I’m telling you there are people out there, and I know, I come from blue collar, hard-working, these folks are scraping to make a living and they’re going to wake up and find this incredible mogul paid $750,” said former Ohio Republican Gov. If a man with his own airliner, gold-leafed homes and string of golf resorts can get away with that, who is to argue that system is not irretrievably biased against regular people? The key figure – that Trump paid just $750 in taxes in two straight years – might be the most damning, since it is so identifiable and strikes such a clear comparison to the larger figure almost all Americans pay. “You have in Donald Trump a President who spends his time thinking about how he can work his way out of paying taxes of meeting the obligation that every other working person in this country meets every year … with Joe Biden you have somebody who has a completely different perspective on what it means to be a working family in this country,” Bedingfield said. While the President’s most loyal devotees may not be shifted by such an attack, it is hard to see how it does not damage him among wavering blue-collar voters in the post-industrial heartland in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which are crucial to Trump’s narrow pathway to 270 electoral votes.īiden campaign communications director Kate Bedingfield told CNN on Sunday that the report clarified the contrast between the President and the Democratic nominee. Trump’s complicated and self-serving tax arrangements play directly into this construct. In recent days, Biden has sought to undermine Trump’s good approval ratings on the economy by billing the election as a contest between Scranton, Pennsylvania – where he was born – and Park Avenue. In the short-term, the New York Times report gives Biden a golden opportunity to put Trump on the defensive during their first debate in Cleveland, Ohio, on Tuesday evening. The Times report, for instance, says that the President has been battling the Internal Revenue Service for years over whether losses he claimed should have resulted in a staggering tax refund of $73 million. The reporting also raises the possibility that Trump’s deceptive accounting, already the focus of several investigations in New York, could open him up to serious legal issues when he leaves office. It leaves the President facing multiple questions about his morals, behavior - and patriotism since he appears to be paying more in taxes to several foreign nations than he is to Uncle Sam. It poses a grave challenge to a presidency that we now know Trump may need to preserve to outrun creditors with hundreds of millions of dollars in loans soon coming due. The publication of the deeply reported article, based on more than two decades of his tax information obtained by The Times, comes just two days before the first presidential debate and 37 days before an election in which he is trailing Democrat Joe Biden. Tony Schwartz, who penned Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal,” said even he was surprised by the “sheer brazenness” of Trump’s behavior, remarking to CNN’s Anderson Cooper that it revealed the “kind of mind that would think ‘I can get away with paying no taxes on hundreds of millions of dollars in income.’” “This is a con man in the White House,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told CNN Sunday, referring to a President who shattered convention by refusing to release his tax records to the public while running for office. View Trump and Biden head-to-head polling The story also reveals the extent to which Trump’s status as President is being used to shore up his losing ventures - for example his hotel in Washington, DC, and his golf resorts. Trump took huge deductions – including $70,000 to take care of his hair – and also appeared to write off hundreds of thousands of dollars paying his daughter Ivanka as a consultant to the Trump Organization, according to the Times report. In 20 each, Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes – far less than many Americans who are working hard amid a deep recession to stay afloat. But the article portrays the anti-elite crusader who rails against a corrupt system as actually using its loopholes to avoid paying any federal taxes at all in 10 of 15 years beginning in 2000 by writing off his own staggering losses. Trump refused to talk about his tax returns and blasted the Times report as “totally fake news” on Sunday. New York Times: Trump paid no income taxes in 10 out of 15 years beginning in 2000
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