In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, then-candidate Donald Trump claimed that he couldn’t share his tax returns with the public because an IRS audit prevented him from doing so. According to a newly published book, however, this was a lie that Trump deliberately concocted to avoid releasing his taxes.
Every viable nominee for president since Richard Nixon — save for Trump — has shared several years of their tax records with the American public for the purpose of transparency. In 2016, Trump became the first candidate since the 1970s not to do so.
In “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,” New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman details how Trump and his staff came up with the lie on his plane during the 2016 campaign. Trump contemplated how he could “get [himself] out of this” in a discussion with his then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and his campaign press secretary Hope Hicks, Haberman wrote.
On the plane, “[Trump] leaned back, before snapping up to a sudden thought. ‘Well, you know my taxes are under audit. I always get audited,’ Trump said,” according to an excerpt from the book.
Trump believed that this was the perfect solution, Haberman wrote, as he’d “never not be under audit.”
Later on the campaign trail, Trump would claim that his lawyers had advised him against releasing his taxes, saying that it would be unwise to do so during an audit.
As several fact checks at the time (and in the years since) have pointed out, there is no law that prohibits individuals, including presidential candidates, from sharing their tax returns if they’re under an audit from the IRS. Instead, Trump was likely reluctant to share his tax returns because they’d paint him in a bad light — they could showcase, for example, that he was losing millions of dollars in revenue each year, or that he pays a substantially lower tax rate than most Americans with less wealth do annually.
Indeed, when the billionaire’s taxes eventually leaked in the fall of 2020, they showed that he had paid just $750 in income taxes in both 2016 and 2017 .
Months after Trump became president, he claimed that the American people no longer cared about his taxes. In reality, polling from his second presidential run in 2020 found that the vast majority of Americans (66 percent) agreed that he “should release his tax returns from earlier years.”
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.