The Trumpeters are willing to tolerate a lot of crookedness so long as he upholds his promise to be as shitty as possible to non-white people. That’s their core issue.
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Oh come on… that’s only half of them (and growing, as the rest of his supporters gradually fall off (though I wonder if these supporters aren’t also starting to fall off as he fails to deliver their Muslim ban)).
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The only victims of Trump are the people who didn’t vote for him. The ones who did, fuck those people.
And yet the two biggest Trumpeters I know are non-white people who insist he’s good for the economy. He just shoots his mouth off, you see. The important thing is he’s a successful business man, and any examples to the contrary are false.
All the Trumpeters I’ve heard from lately just spout the same key phrases over and over again, like automatons. I am not convinced they’ve actually thought critically about the situation in a while.
They like overt shows of power. And they like talk of being tough on the economy, so long as no austerity measures affect them. And that’s about as far as they get.
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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?
Unfortunately the only way out of this mess is to see that guy in the
crowd as the victim, even though he won and we’re the ones suffering.
To take this to the highest Godwin level, “the victims of fascism” were the townspeople of Weimar who were forced to walk through the Buchenwald concentration camp after the close of WW2.
I had a friend who had a large quantity of non-vested Netscape (!) stock. He owed the IRS some large amount for the year he received it ($250k). By the time his holding vested and he actually could sell it, it was nearly worthless. But he was still on the hook for $250k. What a country!
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Are you a billionaire?
Then, no.
I take your point that trump probably paid what his accountant told him to pay, and that whatever he did or didn’t pay is immaterial since he operated within the tax laws/loopholes to be able to pay zero tax. But all that says to me is that 1) the tax laws are shit and should be fixed to remove any such loopholes, especially for rich folk, and 2) trump is double douche-tastic because not only didn’t he pay taxes, he also doesn’t pay people/charities he said he paid or would pay. 3) Lastly, it’s yet another one of the political norms he so casually flouted, and I’ll be damned if I just handwave it away.
And one last thing: the only information we have about trump’s taxes comes from trump himself, and we know how honest he is about…everything. Why should I believe anything he has to say about his taxes (or any other matter) when it’s abundantly clear that he lies about everything great or small?
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GENERALLY SPEAKING!!! (…for people out there who may misinterpret my post and/or try to spin it into something else; yes, I’ve been there):
People don’t care (as much) if THEIR side wins by cheating (e.g., lying).
People won’t care (as much) if THEIR guy is a crook/liar.
There’s a big difference between the asshole who is (by and large) in a position of providing mostly “entertainment value” (pre-campaign), and the asshole who is now the most powerful asshole on Earth.
Now that the biggest asshole on Earth is now the most powerful one, the asshole is now emboldened to vomit out garbage that relatively few people knew before, regarding his innermost thoughts.
Bottom Line: He’s screwed over likely many thousands of people before, but now he’s gearing to screw over many millions, and not just in the US. More people getting screwed; more voices opposing him.
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No, I’m definitely far from a billionaire…whatever stock gains I once had largely went into escaping a bad marriage and buying a house that sunk into the side of a hill.
My point isn’t that Trump did something morally upstanding that we should applaud, but that he (as far as we know) pairs the taxes he was legally obligated to. Focusing on any lawbreaking taxes there is a waste of time and rage.
Stick to the bribes he offered to let Trump University off the hook, or in fact to Trump University itself. There are lots of places where he indeed did commit felonies. Or at least where all known evidence points to it. Why attack the strong spots where he has a defense, attack the weak spots where he has nothing. (TrumpU isn’t the only one, failure to divest? Possible collision with a foreign power during the election? So many good targets!)
The critical part of your post is, “as far as we know”. And having seen how honest trump is in dealing with everyone else, what makes you think he’s telling the truth about any part of his taxes?
Further, America has political norms: Incoming presidents don’t send their predecessors straight into the arms of the police (“lock her up”) and they definitely don’t regularly demean the Federal Government, it’s workers, or the policies thereof; they also don’t demean regular Americans or anyone if they can help it. trump has trod upon those norms and then laughed about it because, you know, he’s so much smarter and better and greater than anyone else that he transcends tradition and makes it anew in his image. /s
It’s not the lawbreaking we’re focused on with trump’s taxes, it’s the political norms that, at least in part, shape the gov’t as a whole and allow the US to function, politically and socially.
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shrug
Ok, your rage, use it on what you want. Everything else you listed seems more useful for it though.
The IRS has his returns, if it was full of illegal stuff the ought to have uncovered it already (except for the 2016 year).
I guess we can each hate him in our own individual ways.
I think you’ve bowed out of this, so I don’t want to belabor the point, but notice that the IRS didn’t catch trump out on his foundation shenanigans (all of which appear to be lies) or his claimed but distinct lack of charitable giving. Tax returns would flesh out those sorts of issues that the IRS doesn’t have the time, interest, or expertise to sort through, but journalists and other researchers do.
I’m in favor of pulling all the available threads on trump’s already tattered coat of governance. I want him to feel the cold and rain all over his corpulent frame.
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Ok, nope, now I think you are right. Dammit. I thought I had found just one less thing to be losses off about.
So…now I’m also pissed off we don’t have his taxes.
sigh
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