David Frum: Why Is Trump Hiding His Tax Returns? [View all]

[babylonsister]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/whats-hiding-trumps-tax-returns/588862/


Why Is Trump Hiding His Tax Returns?
As the president fights to postpone the inevitable, he risks convincing voters that they do not need a subpoena to read his guilt.
6:00 AM ET
David Frum

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But here’s a reason to wonder whether the calendar serves Trump quite as well as most analysts assume. What is Trump hiding in those returns? Your guess is as good as anyone’s. The secret could be mild: He’s not as wealthy as he likes to boast. The secret could be embarrassing, but not illegal: He personally hugely benefited from special favors in the recent tax cut. The secret could raise national-security concerns. Or the secret could even point to a lifelong career of financial fraud.

The longer the fight over the returns continues—especially if Trump loses in the lower courts but appeals and appeals again—the more likely it is that Americans will assume the worst.

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Polls will not bend Trump on an issue as seemingly existential to him as keeping his tax returns concealed. But the issue of the tax returns may bend Trump’s polls.

Over the next weeks, Trump will be fighting multiple financial-disclosure fights. He has intervened to stop Deutsche Bank from complying with a congressional subpoena of his bank records. He threatens to fight to prevent Special Counsel Robert Mueller from testifying about Trump’s Russia connections. He’s already lost the first round of the emoluments-clause lawsuit filed by the state of Maryland and the District of Columbia.

As Trump fights to conceal his financial records, loses, appeals, and loses again, it becomes progressively more plausible to Republicans that those records conceal damaging revelations about serious wrongdoing. Trump is ultimately fighting to prove he’s not a crook. He can postpone delivering the records that would prove the matter one way or another. But as he fights to postpone the inevitable, he risks convincing voters that they do not need a subpoena to read his guilt.