After inauguration, White House website hit with petition to release Donald Trump’s taxes
It looks like Donald Trump and his team forgot to disable the online petition section of the White House website when they took it over today, and now they’re stuck with a petition they’re going to have a really hard time explaining: one demanding the release of Trump’s tax returns. The Trump also appears to be going back and forth as to whether to allow the public to continue signing the petition in question, creating an even larger controversy in the process.
The petition in question is titled “Immediately release Donald Trump’s full tax returns, with all information needed to verify emoluments clause compliance” — and embarrassingly for Trump, it’s located right there on the official White House website. We’ve reloaded the petition page several times over the past hour, and in some instances it’s been allowing additional signatures by clicking the “Sign Now” button at the bottom of the page, while in other instances the option has gone missing. Are Trump’s people hemming and hawing as to whether to allow the petition to continue? Is this a mere technical glitch as they change over the contents of the whitehouse.gov website? No way to be sure.
But in any case, feel free to go sign the petition on the White House website demanding the release of Donald Trump’s tax returns, which currently has 7,500 signatures in just a few hours. There’s also a White House petition to put Trump’s personal assets in a blind trust.
While it’s incredibly unlikely that Donald Trump will do either one of the things demanded by these two petitions, the key here is that under established rules, he’s supposed to respond to any petition that reaches 100,000 signatures. Trump can junk that rule if he wants, but as of now, the rule is still listed on the petition pages. So at the least, the media can push Trump on whether he’ll respond to these petitions. If he doesn’t take them down entirely.
