https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/04/remember-trumps-taxes-they-are-still-scandal/
Last Sunday, the
New York Times revealed that President Trump — who in 2015 claimed a net worth of
$10 billion — paid $750 in federal income tax his first year in office. Like many a scandal in the age of Trump, it received about 36 hours of attention, and then the news cycle moved on.
First came the unhinged presidential debate on Tuesday. Then Thursday night brought the avalanche of news that longtime Trump adviser Hope Hicks had tested positive for the coronavirus;
Kimberly Guilfoyle, a prominent Trump fundraiser and former Fox News host, had been accused of sexual harassment by a former assistant, whom the network paid millions in a settlement (Guilfoyle denies the allegations);
and first lady Melania Trump hates doing Christmas decorations. As I went to bed, the news broke that Trump and his wife had tested positive for the coronavirus. Who can keep up?
It’s also true that, on one level, the Times’s tax revelation — which
Trump denies — is not much of a surprise. We know that he used
more than $900 million in business losses to avoid taxes in the 1990s, and when challenged on it during the 2016 election, replied such an action was simply “
smart.”
But I think there is another reason for the tax story’s quick fade: We are increasingly inured to financial sleaze reveals. As Jennifer Taub’s new book “
Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime” observes, we are living through an age of financial impunity and greed, and it covers both individuals and corporations.
“Rogues-to-riches stories are common now. Cheating the public — and getting away with it — is the new normal,”
Taub writes, before reviewing grubby stories from recent years. There were the Wells Fargo executives who were pushed out with millions of dollars in severance pay when it was revealed that bank employees, under pressure to keep up with unrealistic sales goals, set up fake accounts for their customers. Then there was the Sackler family, who earned billions from OxyContin, the drug instrumental to the opioid crisis, but was able to keep the great majority of their fortune. And, of course, there was the 2008-09 financial crisis, which saw
more than 7 million families lose their homes to foreclosure, while not a single senior bank executive went to jail.
This sort of stuff inspires a cynicism in the public that, once in place, is hard to combat. Trump’s reputation was hardly unknown when he ran for president. There were decades of reporting on it. Beginning in the late 1970s, the investigative journalist Wayne Barrett flagged Trump’s sleaze, and his donations to politicians who —
voilà! — smoothed the path of his real estate developments.
Even in the incredibly slimy world of New York big-money real estate, Trump’s nastiness and dubious ethics quickly stood out. As Barrett (who died in 2017) recounts in a piece recently published in a collection of his work, “
Without Compromise: The Brave Journalism that First Exposed Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and the American Epidemic of Corruption,” a fellow developer in 1979 described the young Trump’s business practices as “moral larceny.” (Disclaimer: Eileen Markey, the Barrett anthology’s editor, is a friend of mine.)
Trump’s dubious reputation apparently didn’t hurt his 2016 presidential campaign, and might have even helped it. When I interviewed a passel of Trump’s supporters in
the small business community during that campaign, I discovered that not only weren’t they discouraged by reports of Trump’s bottom-of-the-barrel ethics, they believed it was acceptable behavior. Their disheartening message was that people need to do what they need to do to make a go of it in this country.
Once in office, Trump, who campaigned on a promise to use his insider knowledge to “drain the swamp,” instead expanded it. His solitary significant legislative achievement is a tax “reform” plan so generous to real estate developers such as himself,
one analyst told me it could have been written for him. Trump shows significantly less concern for the finances of others, with the result that there is no new round of stimulus for people and businesses suffering pandemic-related financial reversals.
There are obvious policy solutions for that problem of financial sleaziness that Trump personifies. Taub outlines some of them in her book. Internal Revenue Service enforcement could be beefed up, with more audits of the wealthy, and tax loopholes closed legislatively. There are also easy legislative fixes for white-collar financial shenanigans, such as changing the laws so that the political pay-to-play culture is ended, and funding a more aggressive Justice Department. Regulations could better target money laundering and the use of limited liability companies — Trump, let it be said, has
more than 500 — that can be used to obscure financial maneuvers.
But the harder part is shifting our own mind-set. We need to let go of our cynicism and both expect and demand better. Until that happens, nothing will change.
