Former US President Donald Trump’s tax returns have been released after a bitter six-year battle.
These documents shed light on his trading losses and tax payments made during his presidency.
The statements indicated that Trump paid no taxes to the federal government in 2020, while he paid just $750 in 2016 and 2017.
But Trump paid nearly $1 million in taxes to federal authorities in 2018.
And the publication of these statements is not likely, according to experts, to affect Trump’s chances of running in the next presidential election.
Trump has long opposed the release of his tax returns, saying it would deepen the political divide in the country.
American presidents are paid as much as any public servant in the country. Although they did publish their tax returns, there is no law requiring them to do so.
Records showed that the Federal Tax Service did not investigate Trump’s tax records during the early years of his presidency. But it started after Democrats demanded access to commission records.
Ever since they entered politics, Trump’s opponents have wanted to show the truth about his wealth.
Conversely, Trump has always courted voters on the grounds that his money has kept him immune to special interests and kickbacks targeting politicians.
The former president has opposed the disclosure of his tax records.
The disclosed records cover the period 2015 to 2020, and thus include his presidency.
Trump has warned that the disclosure of these documents reinforces the state of polarization in the American political arena.
“The Democrats shouldn’t have done that, and the Supreme Court shouldn’t have decided that,” he said in a statement, “This is going to lead to terrible things for a lot of people.”
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These are the stages that preceded the publication of today’s records, Friday:
Trump defies convention
For decades, US presidential candidates and incumbents have published their tax returns in favor of transparency and accountability.
The long-standing tradition has been “basically to try to reassure the public that the president operates free of conflict and interest, and taxes are a window into someone’s financial soul,” said Steve Rosenthal, a senior member of the Tax Non-partisan Policy Center.
But Trump “broke all conventions,” Rosenthal said, refusing to release his tax returns as a presidential candidate in the 2016 election.
And his insistence on not revealing it has increased the fears of opponents that he might be hiding something. Some have wondered: is what he’s hiding is that he’s not as wealthy as he claims or that he paid less taxes than he should have?
Meanwhile, her supporters have argued for her right to privacy. After all, there is no legal requirement for an applicant to disclose their tax return.
The New York Times investigation
Throughout his presidency and beyond, the public has gradually seen a facet of Trump’s personal tax record.
Much of that comes from the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation released by the New York Times in 2020, which obtained records of two decades of Trump’s tax returns from the run-up to his presidency. The documents provided unprecedented insight into Trump’s finances.
Those filings revealed that he paid negligible amounts in federal income taxes during that time, and that he reported in his tax returns that his businesses lost large sums of money, despite his public bragging about his financial successes.
In 2017, the newspaper reported that Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes despite being a billionaire.
Rosenthal said the New York Times published “question whether he is a billionaire or if there is some trick he uses to avoid paying taxes, legally or otherwise.”
image copyright Reuters
Trump Tower
Take the fight to the Supreme Court
Meanwhile, Democrats in Washington have begun using their powers to censure Trump should he win a majority in the House of Representatives in early 2019.
For three years, a House committee has been demanding access to Trump’s tax returns.
This year, the battle moved to the US Supreme Court. In November, judges refused to withhold tax returns from the commission, allowing them to be published.
On Dec. 21, the commission voted to make the tax returns it obtained public, splitting the vote between the two sides.
The release of the tax documents on Friday comes just days before Republicans take control of the House of Representatives, which points to the possibility of halting any prosecution of Trump’s financial documents in the near future.
But the Senate, which is controlled by Democrats, can continue these investigations.
