Trump’s cowardly lyin’: Why the Donald refuses to show all his tax returns

New York Daily News

October 3, 2016

The unauthorized disclosure of three pages of Donald Trump’s 1995 tax returns confirmed above all that the Republican presidential nominee would bring cowardice into the White House.

After making false promises about releasing his returns followed by false explanations for his failure to do so, Trump is simply afraid to defend his tax record before voters.

The three summary pages for 1995 indicate that he claimed $916 million in business losses — without a visible drop in his standard of living — enabling Trump to write off that much in income over the next 18 years.

Who knows what the rest of his very thick return for that year would show? Perhaps that most of the losses Trump claimed from business implosions actually fell on his lenders — in other words, that burning through other people’s money became Trump’s ticket to living tax free.

And who knows what Trump’s more current returns would show? Certainly that his tax reform proposals would enable him to claim even bigger write-offs — before bequeathing his wealth to his children tax-free.

More important, Trump’s utter inability to play straight with America about his taxes indisputably signals that he would infect the Oval Office with an instinct to evade when the going gets tough.

Making a mockery of Trump’s outrage that the system has been rigged for the rich, his campaign and surrogates, notably the ever more lunatic Rudy Giuliani, contend that the tax return revelations prove that Trump is a business “genius” — never mind that he ran a publicly traded company into the ground and made six trips to bankruptcy court.

The tax revelation is especially inconvenient for Trump because he has savaged others for paying less than their fair share.

“HALF of Americans don’t pay income tax despite crippling govt debt,” he tweeted in 2012.

Barack Obama “only pays 20.5%” on his presidential salary, Trump complained in another tweet that year, “Do as I say not as I do.”

That’s a perfect mantra for the Trump tax plan, which would deliver annual benefits of at least $122,000 a year to members of the top 1%; eliminate the estate tax, which prevents Americans with more than $5 million from passing every last dollar to heirs; and, whopper of all whoppers, slash the tax rate on “pass-through” income, which is crucial to the Trump family business.

Attempting to change the subject, Giuliani attacked the infidelities that plagued Hillary Clinton’s marriage and her response to them.

Once, when he was mayor of New York City, Giuliani would not have dignified such rhetoric. But, after long wintering in irrelevance, Giuliani has leaped to promote Trump’s candidacy.

Only a hardcore limelight junkie would throw stones about infidelity in someone else’s marriage even though he had engaged in high-profile marital infidelity himself. And even though he speaks in service of a notorious philanderer, whose dodging on taxes proves he lacks the moral courage for the job he seeks.