Tax Dodger

The New York Times obtained 20 years of tax returns for Fuckface von Clownstick. The Times reports Dear Leader paid only $750 of federal income tax for 2016 and paid nothing in ten of the previous 15 years. He is also over $400 million in debt with loans coming due over the next four years. I.R.S. fines could amount to $100 million.

The tax returns that [Mr. Orange] 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.

I can't wait for him to prove The Times wrong when he immediately releases his true tax returns! 

Update (September 28):  Andrew Weissmann suggests Fuckface owes that money to Russians.

Update (September 29):  Roger Sollenberger says Manbaby might owe as much as $1 billion. He quotes Barb McQuade.

Someone with a mountain of debt like [the president] is a national security risk and would be unable to get a security clearance if he were any other government employee. When someone is desperate for cash, they are susceptible to blackmail or bribery. For that reason, people with massive debt or in bankruptcy are not permitted access to our nation's secrets.

Amanda Marcotte points out Dear Leader tends to actively makes things worse. Quoting Greg Sargent:

[T]hese tax returns show that [his] epic cheating wasn't shrewd so much as a desperate effort to "compensate for truly epic levels of incompetence and failure."

[W]e can see the same tendencies playing out with the coronavirus pandemic. If [he] had simply left well enough alone, letting public health officials do their job, the pandemic would still be bad, but would now be much better contained.

Marcotte also quotes First Daughter that "my dad's communication style is not to everyone's taste" but that "the results speak for themselves." 

Yeah, First Daughter: They do. ... [A]s these tax documents prove, it's a lie that goes back decades. [Agent Orange] is both an asshole and a terrible businessman, quite possibly the worst on planet Earth. He surrounds himself in gold-plated cheese, but his real Midas talent is his ability to turn anything he touches to ashes. He did it to his endlessly fake and failed business enterprises, and now he's doing it to our country.

Update (September 30):  David Cay Johnston explains Fuckface's history of tax fraud and how tax avoidance is common among the wealthy. 

Getting caught cheating, again and again, didn't make him into anything even vaguely resembling an honest taxpayer.

What [he] did learn long ago from his mentor and "second father," the notoriously corrupt lawyer Roy Cohn, was to lie, cheat, steal and never ever apologize or concede any fact. Just tie the authorities up for years and make them pour their limited resources into a case so they will give up and cry uncle.

Update (October 5):  Alex Henderson notes that tax avoidance is not the same as tax evasion and discusses an article by Derek Thompson which presents three scenarios for understanding Fuckface's tax history.

Explanation 1: [His] Businesses Are Doing Terribly, Explanation 2: Extremely Questionable Tax Maneuvering, and Explanation 3: A Mystery Only Prosecutors Can Unwind.

Update (October 9):  James McFadden speculates on who leaked the tax returns. 

Update (January 1, 2023):  After three years of legal battles, the House Ways and Means Committee released six years of Fuckface tax returns. David Cay Johnston analyzes the many instances of fraud.

One technique he used at least 26 times between 2015 and 2020 was as simple as it was flagrant. [Von Clownstick] filed sole proprietor reports, known as Schedule C, that showed huge business expenses despite having zero revenue. That created losses which [he] used to offset his income from work and investments, thus lowering his income taxes. Additional Schedule Cs had expenses exactly equal to revenues while only a few showed profits.

The 65 Schedule Cs [Dear Leader] filed as a candidate and as president helped him convert a federal tax bill that could have been as high as $46 million into a $2.1 million profit from the federal tax system.