Ok, lets not be as bad as the folks that decided HRC must be guilty because people keep shouting about it. Allright?
We think Trump’s Bankruptcy and other things gave him a rolling tax credit that let him not pay any taxes some years. That is to say “the tax rules said he could do a thing, and he did it”.
The problem isn’t that he followed rules and paid no taxes, the problem is he was twittering up a storm about Obama wasting “our” tax money in a year we think he paid no taxes and should have said “Obama wastes your tax money”. It is poor form, but not illegal.
In the 1990s I got some bad tax advice and ended up owning over $100k in taxes one year, a year in which my total income and anything I got from investments was well under $100k. That was a bad time, but aside from that, because of the way I got billed for so much I ended up with a rolling tax credit. Unfortunately other tax regulations said I could only apply a tiny bit of that credit each year and it basically sat there for a decade and change. At some point, and I think it was after Obama took office the AMT tax credit rules were changed and the amount you could apply each year was uncapped, or maybe it just got a way higher cap. The end result is sometime after Obama came into office I had a year with effectively no taxes (I still had star taxes, an I think I ended up paying something to the feds, but it was way way way way less then I normally do, like I got a big refund as opposed to paying out $10k+ like normal).
That wasn’t illegal. That was following the IRS’s rules. You could look at it as me loaning the federal government money from the 90’s through to the 00’s, and accepting a lower tax bill one year in return for the loan. Except they didn’t give me any interest. Or any choice in giving them the money in the first place 
I expect Trump’s no-tax years was similar. Following real tax rules, not fraud. Probably.
He has done enough actually illegal stuff, maybe we should focus on that. If not let’s make sure we label the stuff that is just ethically questionable but probably legal differently from the stuff that “is probably actually jail time type illegal”, ok?
