Donald Trump is even more afraid than we thought

| 6:04 pm EDT April 15, 2019
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Donald Trump has been putting on a good show. You have to give him that much. For the past month he’s been acting like a guy who’s been fully exonerated in every one of his scandals, who now had a clear path to 2020, and who was free to carry out the most grotesquely anti-American agenda possible without worry. But on this day we’re reminded that it is, in his own ghoulish way, just an act – and he’s very much afraid.

In recent days it’s become clear that House Democrats aren’t going to stop until they have their hands on Donald Trump’s tax returns. It’s a bold gambit. Democrats are betting that the documents will expose Trump for the criminal that most Americans already think he is. On the other hand, if Trump’s tax returns end up looking pretty normal, the Democrats will have a hard time explaining to the American public why they were so aggressive in obtaining them.

So now it’s up to Donald Trump when it comes to how aggressively he wants to fight the inevitable, and today he showed his hand. Trump’s lawyers just fired off a surreal letter claiming that the House Ways and Means Committee’s request to see Trump’s tax returns is a “radical view of unchecked congressional power,” according to the New York Times. Again, Trump could just publicly release his tax returns and gain points if they were even moderately clean, because most people are expecting them to be a treasure trove of corruption.

Instead, Donald Trump is having his attorneys frantically double down on a legal strategy that, because the law is just that simple and clear cut in this regard, even he has to know can’t work. He’s also revealed today that he’s going to fight against his own accounting firm Mazars when it comes to the release of his financial records. Trump can’t win either of these fights – and when you’re reduced to taking on battles you know you can’t win, it means you don’t see a path to winning.