NYT acquires 1995 Trump tax return; he deducted $916 million in business losses

[Suburbia]

Well, I guess we know why he doesn't want to release all of his returns.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Well, I guess we know why he doesn't want to release all of his returns.

What this has done is validate that Trump wouldn't release his tax returns because they contained something that looked bad (which most people suspected was the case).  What his continuing failure to release them indicates is that there's something still in them that would look even worse.

[Landslide Lyndon]

This thread has been a lot easier to read when Seriously is put on ignore. When you do that, half of this thread is hidden

Unfortunately too many posters are still taking the troll's bait.

[Interlocutor is just not there yet]

This thread has been a lot easier to read when Seriously is put on ignore. When you do that, half of this thread is hidden

Unfortunately too many posters are still taking the troll's bait.

That's the only real negative of this thread

[Seriously?]

This thread has been a lot easier to read when Seriously is put on ignore. When you do that, half of this thread is hidden

Unfortunately too many posters are still taking the troll's bait.

That's the only real negative of this thread

You guys are funny. Equating what we call "debate" in this country with trolling. There's nothing "trolling" about articulating the other side's viewpoint.

It must be a nice cocoon that you live in, full of failed Democrat idealism and policies.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

You know... I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but... the media has suddenly stopped talking about Trump's problems with women.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

You know... I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but... the media has suddenly stopped talking about Trump's problems with women.

Oh it'll be coming back I'm sure. The strategy seems to be a sort of tag team on Trump with scandals so they never get spun out and he can't properly respond.

[Likely Voter]

The NYT reporter who  got the docs was on CNN this morning and it seemed she was implying that she had more docs. They spent 10 days just verifying the one doc they reported on yesterday so it may be an issue of verification and/or they want to string it out.  She also implied that she knows who the source is

[Interlocutor is just not there yet]

The NYT reporter who  got the docs was on CNN this morning and it seemed she was implying that she had more docs. They spent 10 days just verifying the one doc they reported on yesterday so it may be an issue of verification and/or they want to string it out.  She also implied that she knows who the source is

Sounds like we're in for some NYT surprises right before/during/after the 2nd debate

[Devout Centrist]

The NYT reporter who  got the docs was on CNN this morning and it seemed she was implying that she had more docs. They spent 10 days just verifying the one doc they reported on yesterday so it may be an issue of verification and/or they want to string it out.  She also implied that she knows who the source is

Maybe Francis Urquhart I mean, Paul Ryan is doing this.

[Likely Voter]

Well if they can't confirm with other sources, like they did with the old accountant, they won't be able to do more.  But it's the NYT, so if anyone can do it, it would be them.  And of course WaPo are probably now trying hard to catch up.  Both are competitive. While everyone remembers WaPo for Watergate, once they broke the story, a lot of the subsequent revelations came from the NYT.   

It's a good bet that by election day we will know more about Trump's taxes

[Hermit For Peace]

Well if they can't confirm with other sources, like they did with the old accountant, they won't be able to do more.  But it's the NYT, so if anyone can do it, it would be them.  And of course WaPo are probably now trying hard to catch up.  Both are competitive. While everyone remembers WaPo for Watergate, once they broke the story, a lot of the subsequent revelations came from the NYT.   

It's a good bet that by election day we will know more about Trump's taxes

And be aghast, with our jaws hanging open in mind-boggling incredulity at what we are witnessing.

[EnglishPete]

You know... I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but... the media has suddenly stopped talking about Trump's problems with women.

Well the documents were sent in an envelope with the address of Trump Tower.

This leak provides the context for all the other ones. When other tax returns are leaked, either by him or by someone else, showing that he paid no Federal income tax whilst earning a lot of money, then he won't have to explain it (having to explain things always looks bad) because the explanation would have been given in the media today.

That's one reason for him to leak this

[GeorgiaModerate]

You know... I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but... the media has suddenly stopped talking about Trump's problems with women.

Well the documents were sent in an envelope with the address of Trump Tower.

This leak provides the context for all the other ones. When other tax returns are leaked, either by him or by someone else, showing that he paid no Federal income tax whilst earning a lot of money, then he won't have to explain it (having to explain things always looks bad) because the explanation would have been given in the media today.

That's one reason for him to leak this

It should say something if we're seriously considering that Trump might have leaked potentially damaging info (which this likely is, to a large number of voters) just to push some other damaging info out of the news cycle.

This reminds me of something Nate Silver talked about recently: there's so much stuff about Trump that there isn't enough news cycle to cover it all.  He quantified this by defining a "mitt" as a unit of shady/questionable/newsworthy stuff about a candidate.  1 mitt was defined as the amount of this clinging to Mitt Romney, a mostly straight-up guy.  Obama was also pretty clean, perhaps a little shadier than Romney; say 1.2 mitts.  Hillary Clinton, OTOH, has a lot more baggage, probably in the 5 mitt range.  But Trump is at least 50 mitts -- which is so far off the scale that it can't all be covered in depth.  So he only gets covered at about a level of about 7 or 8 mitts.  (This was written a few weeks ago; that number might be higher now.)

[NOVA Green]

Regardless of any ethical issues and potential tax code violations, this story is majorly problematic for Trump in more fundamental ways....

1.) It reinforces a stereotype/narrative that Trump is an egotistical and selfish individual who "doesn't care about people like you and me".

2.) It raises questions about Trump's "honesty and trustworthiness" to ordinary Americans that aren't obsessive fact-checkers, cable-news junkies, internet news junkies, etc... that are somewhere like 80% of the electorate. Questions regarding his honesty first came up to a majority of Americans during the debate regarding his claims of having "opposed the Iraq War from the beginning". Clinton has been gradually catching up with Trump on the "honesty gap" since the debate, and this will likely move that further. "If he doesn't have anything to hide, than why not release his taxes".

3.) Even more significantly it undermines one of the core planks of the image of Trump that he has presented to voters. The image of a self-made and successful businessman who by dint of hard-work, talent and skills, was able to build a business empire from scratch, which is a story that most Americans see to be a positive as part of our founding myth national cultural narratives.

In every Presidential election there are both tangibles and intangibles..... intangibles are items like trust, caring, honesty, and judgement and the tangibles are more of the conventional party platform positions.

People can try to spin this anyway they want, but regardless Clinton has made major ground on the intangibles, and is even now expanding a gap as a result of this story.

[Ebsy]

This is literally the number 1 story on every national news website and the comments are uniformly negative.

[Meclazine for Israel]

Trump is in trouble now.

(a) He lost someone else's money
(b) Then he paid no company tax for 18 years.

That is ruinous to his chances.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Trump is in trouble now.

(a) He lost someone else's money
(b) Then he paid no company tax for 18 years.

That is ruinous to his chances.

This was his personal tax return, not a corporate one.

[DrScholl]

This is one story that the media can't spin in Trump's favor.

[Meclazine for Israel]

Trump is in trouble now.

(a) He lost someone else's money
(b) Then he paid no company tax for 18 years.

That is ruinous to his chances.

This was his personal tax return, not a corporate one.

Sorry, I thought this was a company debt, which he failed to pay back and converted into a loss.

I agree with Giuliani that it is a media spin, but the timing is impeccable.

The media only have to pump this for a fortnight, and he is toast.

CNN are all over him on it.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Funny. Because Trump would pay me to post polls -- both positive and negative -- about his campaign, right? If I were on the payroll, I'd only be posting the ones with Trump up, not every day of a tracking poll no matter where it lies.

Of course its actually the Clinton campaign who is hiring paid trolls.  We had the same thing in the UK, people posting pro Brexit or UKIP comments on social media or news media below the line comments sections would be accused of being paid UKIP trolls (as if UKIP had the money to spend on paid trolls) whereas it was actually the EU that was hiring plenty of paid trolls.

pro tip: nobody is paying trolls. the sad fact is we all do this for free

Well that, plus the fact that Trump doesn't pay his employees.

[NOVA Green]

This is one story that the media can't spin in Trump's favor.

Hard to see how there can be any positive spin.... when a candidate's intangibles are already extremely negative, and now sinking faster than the Titanic after running into an iceberg.

The overwhelming majority of adult Americans work and pay taxes excepting retirees and college students, and to most Americans, it is inconceivable that a Billionaire could get away with almost a
$1 Billion tax break, when they are lucky to have made $2-3 Million over an entire working lifetime.

Like Nixon famously used to say.... "How will it play in Peoria".

See my comments up-thread.

[Nyvin]

I'm honestly really shocked how widespread this story has become,  it's being reported on every fricking website that I've seen and the major news networks are all mentioning it (from what I've seen) too.

I guess this story might have some staying power.

[Doimper]

It would've been a lot less damaging if Trump had just released all his returns back before the convention and spun these deductions as something all smart businesspeople do.

[Attorney General, LGC Speaker, and Former PPT Dwarven Dragon]

Funny. Because Trump would pay me to post polls -- both positive and negative -- about his campaign, right? If I were on the payroll, I'd only be posting the ones with Trump up, not every day of a tracking poll no matter where it lies.

Of course its actually the Clinton campaign who is hiring paid trolls.  We had the same thing in the UK, people posting pro Brexit or UKIP comments on social media or news media below the line comments sections would be accused of being paid UKIP trolls (as if UKIP had the money to spend on paid trolls) whereas it was actually the EU that was hiring plenty of paid trolls.

pro tip: nobody is paying trolls. the sad fact is we all do this for free

And the one user that did get paid was banned  (Dudabides).