People were calling for the president’s arrest after the New York Times revealed the purported billionaire may be guilty of tax evasion.
Photo Caption: Well, now we know why Donald Trump didn’t want the public to see his tax returns. Trump benefited from a system that rewards those who can afford the most creative accountants. Americans paid for Trump’s $73m tax refund – and he’s laughing all the way to the bank. He ended up paying $750 total in 2016 despite hundreds of millions of dollars in income from The Apprentice and his various companies
(ASSOCIATED PRESS) – – The New York Times’ bombshell report Sunday night that revealed Donald Trump‘s tax information over the past couple of decades has prompted an angry chorus of demands across social media calling for the president to be arrested. The new report on Trump’s taxes shows that he “has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life.”
The report came two days before Trump’s first debate against Joe Biden and one day after the president nominated Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg‘s replacement on the U.S. Supreme Court with just barely more than a month until Election Day.
Aside from the expected outrage on social media, there were also inevitable comparisons to Al Capone, the infamous Chicago gangster of the 1920s whose ultimate downfall was tax evasion, a term that became a top trending topic on Twitter hours after the Times’ story broke.
While the Times did not make any direct allegations of tax evasion, it did report the following:
“The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.”
To be clear, according to the Times, Trump has paid a total of $1,500 ($750 in each of the two years he paid) in federal taxes since he’s been president and didn’t pay any federal taxes — zero dollars — in 10 of the past 15 years. Trump’s tax records also show he owes more than $300 million in overall debt and lost $47.4 million in 2018, which is a far cry from the $434.9 million he publicly boasted making that year.