‘There Are No Trump Mysteries’

Elections

I wrote today about one of the lessons of the new report on Trump’s taxes:

The surprise about the big New York Times story on Donald Trump’s tax returns is that there are no real surprises.

Trump’s taxes have been an obsession of the Left since he, in violation of a longstanding norm, reneged on his promise to release his returns during the 2016 campaign.

Pieces were written urging some brave whistleblower to come forward with them, and Democrats counted as one of the advantages of taking the House that they could demand Trump’s returns. The dispute resulting from the administration’s refusal to turn them over is now probably headed to the Supreme Court.

All the while, the expectation, or at least the suspicion, was that the returns contained some awful secret, perhaps evidence that he is a tool of the Russians.

And here, the New York Timeshas obtained Trump’s tax information spanning a decade from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, and the revelation is that he wasn’t doing as well as he said in public and lost a boatload of money in a period that nearly destroyed him. In other words, exactly what anyone paying any attention would have expected.

Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via email: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *