Donald Trump just shot himself in the foot
Donald Trump should be having a great day, considering he keeps getting to use two of his favorite words: “Fake news.” Alas, he is not — thanks to the bombshell dropped by the New York Times. While the rest of us struggle to make ends meet, sometimes ending up paying taxes with money we do not have, a self-proclaimed billionaire has been bilking the system for years. No wonder he gave his rich friends a tax break. He wants them to be freeloaders like him. The sheer depth of Trump’s duplicity is overshadowed only by his lying about the duplicity (among other things).
When he began his run for the White House, Trump said that he would “be happy” to release his tax returns. Once he took office, he fought fiercely to keep them hidden, and we now know why. Once again, “president” Donald Trump has been proven a liar. Back in 2015, as Trump was preparing to run for office, CNN broke a story on his multiple corporate bankruptcies. According to Trump, “successful businesses file for bankruptcies all the time.” CNN busted that lie by comparing Trump’s corporate bankruptcies to companies like General Motors, Lehman Brothers, and major airlines.
According to CNN’s findings, less than 20% of companies with assets of $1 billion or more have filed bankruptcy in the last 30 years. As a result, Bankruptcy.com placed Trump in the top tier of filers “in recent decades.” Further, while Trump was out filing bankruptcies, he was also inflating his income to secure bank loans, something Michael Cohen told us during his testimony before Congress. When Cohen recently released his book, Trump’s press secretary Kayleigh McEnany called him a “disgraced lawyer” and “felon” who has no credibility. That sounds more like Trump than Cohen, as virtually everything Cohen said during his testimony appears to be true.
The most egregious information to come out of Trump’s tax returns is his failure to pay any taxes at all in 11 of the last 18 years, and upon taking office, he paid $750.00. ABC analysts said that the taxes Trump paid are equivalent to a taxpayer making $20,000 per year. Yet, this tax cheat, this liar is running our country. No wonder he is running it into the ground. The sad thing is that his supporters will be okay with Trump’s latest deceit. They will think him “cunning” or “smart” to avoid taxes, but where this is going to gut-punch Trump is with independents and Republicans already disillusioned with him and his reckless behavior that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
We cannot take four more years of this lying, draft-dodging, tax-dodging grifter. His “policies” are and always have been nonexistent. He is in office for himself and no one else. He has repeatedly promised “plans”—plans for healthcare, and most recently, a plan for minorities. We have and will never see either. People who continue to support this loser need to take a good, long, hard look in the mirror because something is very wrong with this picture.
Shirley is a former entertainment writer and has worked in the legal field for over 25 years