#LastTimeTrumpPaidTaxes his next wife hadn't been born yet
— Richard Hine (@richardhine) October 2, 2016
#LastTimeTrumpPaidTaxes Mr. Rogers still lived in the neighborhood
— G O L D I E. (@goldietaylor) October 2, 2016
Hero of the alt-right the #LastTimeTrumpPaidTaxes (I might have to leave Twitter for a while after this one) pic.twitter.com/Lkfx7BVM7v
— Evan Sutton (@suttnutz) October 2, 2016
As always, you don’t need a Twitter account to enjoy the show.
(That’s Timothy McVeigh, if you’re too young to remember.)
dmsilev
A point I hope comes up in the debate next week: Trump (a) apparently went for decades without paying Federal income tax and (b) Trump rails against the poor quality of our infrastructure.
Where does Trump think the money for airports and roads comes from? Some of it is user taxes (e.g. the gas tax), but by no means all of it. He’s a moocher complaining about the quality of the free food. Or perhaps better, he’s the proverbial man who murdered his parents and then begged for leniency because he’s an orphan.
redshirt
It’s a good Twitter hashtag, especially because you know Trump is following.
I wonder if they’ve taken away his phones yet.
redshirt
@dmsilev: This is an obvious attack and it should be used frequently; another obvious attack if Trump brings up offshoring and how he’ll bring back manufacturing jobs is to point out his own offshoring.
Bill E Pilgrim
New math
Shell
Man, Giuliani is spinning this one so hard, he’s about to corkscrew himself all the way down to China.
Corner Stone
@dmsilev: #MAGA
But it doesn’t matter. He’s smart for not paying taxes to support Obama invading and starting the Iraq War, HRC murdering Ambassador Stevens and his people in Benghazi and Michelle Obama’s sex change operation before the kidnapped their “kids”.
dmsilev
@Shell: Well, that would be one way for us to get rid of Rudy 911, so spin away!
MJS
This is so great! Not only can he be hit on not paying taxes, he can be hit on being a giant business loser during an economic boom.
Shell
To the right on the Twitter feed, I see Grumpy Old Mans icon is a picture of Tunch? What a beautiful big old blanc-mange he was!
the Conster, la Citoyenne
None of it matters to his supporters – he’s a white supremacist, they’re white supremacists, and this is all just noise. He’s for whites. The only question that remains is the percent of whites who are only beginning to get a fuller picture of his craziness, and are just becoming uncomfortable with his character after last week. Trump is definitely in a negative feedback loop – hope the media keeps highlighting his awfulness, which tightens the gyre. Obama jabbing at him for the next 5 weeks will be interesting.
MikeBoyScout
Where and with whom is Trump’s Billion dollar debt parked?
http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2016/10/some-comments-on-new-york-times-story.html
Hal
People on welfare using my hard earned tax payer dollars to buy ipods and lobster!!!
Trump hasn’t paid taxes in 18 years.
Well that’s very smart of him. Good business man. Why give the government your hard earned tax dollars just so lazy people on welfare can buy steak and lobster and the latest iPhone?!?!!
hovercraft
@Shell:
I would have to give him and F in spinning, he should go see Christie’s spinning, it was much more convincing and with all the distractions he threw in it sounded almost plausible. Rudy was just sputtering bullshit.
Cermet
This matters even less than his racism to the typical thug; only demorats are held accountable to pay taxes. He is smart for avoiding this. Like his failed marriages and not knowing a single passage from the book of dog (aka bible.) These idiots, and racist don’t give a $hit about anything but getting their person in the formally “White House” so it is white again … .
HW3
This is corporate welfare queen saying “I’m smart” for playing the system. Literally eating NY strip steak while the rest of us carry all the weight.
Major Major Major Major
There, I contributed to the thread on that last one by calling somebody who said OKC was a false flag operation (along with all other terror attacks) an idiot.
Twitter!
john fremont
@Hal: That sounds exactly like what’s showing up on my Facebook feed.
Suzanne
@Corner Stone: Did you read that WaPo profile about that woman in Pennsylvania who was institutionalized for threatening the President who believes all of those conspiracies?! God. I couldn’t decide if I felt sympathy or if eugenics might not have been the worst idea ever.
zzyzx
It’s not about taking away his supporters. It’s about preventing people from moving to him.
Ruckus
It seems there are a large number of twits who don’t like Donnie’s paying zero tax. Warren Buffett doesn’t pay as high a percentage as his secretary but he does pay. Donnie doesn’t pay taxes or people who work for him. What a lovely asshole.
Jeffro
Two quick thoughts :
1) where is the reporter brave enough to ask the members of the deep bench how they feel about all this easily available info on trump?
2) Busy doing voter registration for the fourth time does cycle and it feels great !
MJS
@HW3: I’m hoping the ad showing scenes from Trump’s opulent lifestyle while the voiceover explains that he lost almost $1 billion and paid no taxes is currently in production.
Mai.naem.mobile
He abuses the fed court system,also paid for by fed dollars. His SS detail. Fucking leech.
pamelabrown53
@Corner Stone: #6
Hilarious comment! On a more serious note, I think it would be more productive to emphasize Trump’s nearly 1b LOSS: that will hurt him more with the people considering buying into his schtick.
Jeffro
@shomi: it’s funny you should mention Dick Morris I was at a book fair this past weekend and saw a book of his I never knew existed “Condi vs Hillary: and the next campaign for president ”
Good old dick actually got something half right for once ?
Mike E
@Suzanne: Since my family barely survived that last eugenics “experiment” 75 years ago, I’ll have to say no to that idea, thanks
rikyrah
Stuff like this makes Twitter so much fun ??
Mike E
Hey y’all, go ahead and commit this to your keyboard buffer just in case shomi can’t find his/her mom’s basement in time for the next thread…copy&paste troll needs a break!
hovercraft
@Suzanne:
It was linked in one of last night’s threads, she is a sad person, who is suffering many delusions. The fact that she found a home in Trump world, and her delusions are shared by so many people in that world, tells you all you need to know. These people are not playing with a full deck.
Punchy
Wow, Tim Mcveigh looks a lot like that James O’Keefe shitbag…
Suzanne
@Mike E: I was exaggerating for effect. This woman posted that she wanted the president to be lynched, and she was very clearly a complete mess. Like I said, in some ways very sympathetic. In others, a complete danger to others.
PPCLI
@pamelabrown53: Not just a nearly $1B loss: A loss of that size during the boom of the 90’s when everything was booming, and you could double your money just by keeping it for a few years in a low-fee fund.
Not only did he find a way to lose big money running a casino, he found a way to lose big money in the economic boom of the 90s when that took real ingenuity.
(And speaking of those wonderful economic times of the 90s, who was president during that time? I can’t recall just now.)
Suzanne
@hovercraft: I think that more than anything else I have read this year, that piece both touched me and scared me the most. We do not have enough capacity in the mental health system to take care of all of the people like her, and many of them are armed.
No matter who wins this election, we are fucked.
hovercraft
@Corner Stone:
+1
;-)
PPCLI
@pamelabrown53: [Damn. In moderation because of mentioning a particular sort of business Trump runs. Trying again:]
Not just a nearly $1B loss: A loss of that size during the boom of the 90’s when everything was booming, and you could double your money just by keeping it for a few years in a low-fee fund.
Not only did he find a way to lose big money running a cas_ino, he found a way to lose big money in the economic boom of the 90s when that took real ingenuity.
(And speaking of those wonderful economic times of the 90s, who was president during that time? I can’t recall just now.)
Ruviana
@Suzanne: I just read that! That poor ridiculous woman! While I was reading I kept wondering how does one reach such people? The rural Northeast (I live here, though not in PA) is full of people like her and small dying towns where she lives. What happens to them, other than them going down the Trump-crazy rabbit hole?
Amir Khalid
@PPCLI:
We’ve learned from Trump’s visit to Mexico that he is the opposite of a diplomat, and from this information about his taxes (among other things) that he’s the opposite of a businessman. We already knew he’s not a wise man, a calm or patient man, or an unprejudiced man. Nobody makes the case against a Trump presidency better than Trump himself can.
Iowa Old Lady
@Suzanne: This is an extension of Kay’s theory that everyone and everything Trump touches is made worse. The country has been made worse by his reverse-Midas touch. How ironic that it comes from someone who presents himself as a mega successful businessman.
patrick II
What I hate about tv talking heads is that they treat each story piecemeal and without context. I watched Giuliani tell Jake Tapper that Trump was fiscally obligated to his “investors” to take those deductions. In 1995 Trump had a lot of private debt, he made a public stock offering that year and transferred that debt to the new public corporation. Then he paid himself a large salary, charged the new corporation with various fees for his jet, sold things (trump steaks, etc. ) at a huge markup to the public corporation, had the public corporation buy other parts of his near bankrupt private corporation at exorbitant prices for further losses to the stockholder. Eventually the public corporation went bankrupt, all of the suckers who believed in Trump lost money (not to mention the various vendors who worked for him) but Trump came out fine. So, trump’s real fiscal obligation to his investors was to dupe them into taking losses he had already piled up, and pay himself royally for doing so. Tapper pointed none of this out. But, as Trump (and Giuliani ) says, its all legal. Immoral, unethical, fraudulent, yes — but legal. And frankly Trump has no idea of immoral and unethical so those might not as well exist.
The Ancient Randonneur
#LastTimeTrumpPaidTaxes Trump related businesses had filed bankruptcy four times.
ETA: #5 & #6 were stil a few years away.
James E Powell
Quote of the day:
Will this be this year’s “good news . . . for John McCain”?
Zinsky
People should be incensed that this sort of legalized evasion of taxes is allowed. This is why our government is consistently underfunded and why the conservative mindless mantra about “liberals spending too much”, is total horse hockey. The truth is “conversatives don’t tax enough”. Tell that to a conservative, and watch their head explode!
Hob
@Ruviana: On another blog, a lot of people responded to that story by saying the reporter shouldn’t have focused on a severely mentally ill woman as a symbol of the Trump movement, because lots of his supporters are just angry and bigoted and credulous and uninformed but aren’t technically delusional.
My response was that it’s not about whether everyone in the movement is mentally ill. The problem is that this is a movement that relies so much on conspiracy theories, non-factually-based threat warnings, and proud disregard for social norms in general, that it’s virtually designed to make its supporters worse: if someone comes into the movement with just a lot of bad ideas, it’ll egg them on, and if someone comes in with actual psychosis, it’ll egg them on too. They want people to think and act the way this woman thinks and acts, regardless of whether illness led them there against their will or they freely chose it.
gogol's wife
@shomi:
I beg to differ. There are plenty of people who are just tuning in. If they haven’t before seen Trump or Clinton directly and have only heard the media or other people talk about them out of half of their ear, they’re in for a shock, which could be good for our side.
dmsilev
Washington Post just now:
Villago Delenda Est
@HW3: The biggest welfare queens in this country are the 1%. Hands down champions of deadbeats and parasites.
Ivan X
@hovercraft: Totally. While watching Christie speak I was almost admiring of his political skill. I saw how, in his communication style, people might support him. That is, if he hadn’t screwed himself by being a royal asshole for no particular purpose other than that’s who he is.
Anoniminous
@Suzanne:
One of many findings.
Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function
IOW, long term stress screws up thinking, persistent long term stress destroys neurons the basis of the ability to think.
(edited)
SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch
@patrick II:
Either they provide no context and treat these stories as standalones, or they go so far to avoid doing that that they end up being Rachel Maddow with her detailed and interminable back stories. There must be some informative middle ground.
Eric U.
@James E Powell: don’t really remember, but I think that “good news for John McCain” came from tv pundits. Granted many of them are unpaid surrogates for republicans, but not many of them would go so far as Christie has. Although there have been some halfhearted attempts at “good news for Trump” stories.
@Ivan X: If Christie had just limited himself to picking on teachers, he’d be doing fine. His big fights have been screwing up transit, which in New Jersey should be death for a pol’s career. As Atrios pointed out recently, New Jersey’s two cities are Philly and New York City.
Dmbeaster
@Punchy:
They both got their start dressing up like mom to buy bad booze.
EthylEster
So what was the massive loss that led to deduction? That has not been stated in any report I’ve seen.
dmsilev
@Eric U.: Mark Halperin gave us that particular phrase. John McCain couldn’t remember how many houses he and his wife owned (it was something like 7 or 8; I don’t remember, but I’m not John McCain so that’s OK), and it came across as unbelievably out of touch with normal people. Halperin thought the episode was good news for McCain, but I can’t remember what justification he tried to give for that bit of …innovative reasoning.
dmsilev
@EthylEster: We don’t know for sure (would need the detailed schedules of the tax returns to answer that), but speculation is that it had to do with the implosion of his Atlantic City cas!no business around that time.
SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch
@James E Powell:
Which explains why Trump and his campaign staff and his family and his surrogates have been so very eager to get the story out there ever since the day he announced. Right? Right??
Trentrunner
@dmsilev: Hillary will be on it at the next debate. In fact, if her team is REALLY on top of it, they’ll use your “But I’m an orphan” proverb. It’s PERFECT.
Yutsano
@Zinsky: Oh they explode, but not in the way you think. Instead they rail about how THEIR tax rate is too high (even though they have tons of write-offs and deductions) and besides the guubmint would just waste it on welfare queens. I’ve had this conversation way too often with my family.
Side note: I’m seriously regretting my Washington state income tax vote. That little kicker right now would have this state humming.
Trentrunner
@Ivan X: Christie was the only Republican who worried me, just in terms of retail political skill and bullshittery smoothness. The rest were amateurs.
Little did I realize that what the GOP wanted was Cheeto Hitler.
Amir Khalid
@dmsilev:
I’m looking at the WaPo front page right now, And I’m not sure which story it is. Could you help me out?
dmsilev
@Trentrunner: She did raise that point at the first debate (speculating that Trump wasn’t releasing his taxes because maybe he didn’t pay any, and noting that this would mean no money for troops, for schools, etc.), but now that we have some actual evidence, it’d make a huge amount of sense to bring it up again.
Would be interesting if one of the town hall audience members decides to use their question to ask Trump about it directly. He probably wouldn’t handle that well.
(That last sentence is my entry for the Understatement of the Week award)
dmsilev
@Amir Khalid: Trump campaign reels after disclosure of 1995 tax returns. Juicy bits start half a dozen or so paragraphs down.
Anoniminous
deleted
MomSense
@Suzanne:
It’s a complete mess. Thankfully most of the people I work with are not that delusional but there are several who are like that. Sometines it can be scary but most days just really sad. I have cried in my car many times especially when there are kids involved. We really need to fund mental health services.
Eric U.
Trump was losing money when the average return in Atlantic City was 18 percent. He was doing it the same way he’s running his campaign: paying himself way too much, charging high rates to use his other properties, buying his bad debt with the corporation money, etc. Vox has a story up about it now. There is probably more to it than that, a parasite that kills the host is an unsuccessful parasite.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@redshirt: Donny supposed to off shore with the best of them. Even the Trump curious at work were saying that his talk about trade wars was just BS since it would hurt him personally.
Joyce H
@PPCLI:
That’s the real story here. Hillary joked about it months ago, asking “How can anyone lose money operating a CASINO?” That’s a good question, since the whole business model for casinos is simply that people go there and give you their money.
But Trump managed to screw it up. He overbuilt, so that his casinos were cannibalizing one another and there wasn’t enough business to cover their operating expenses and he build the Taj Mahal on borrowed money with an interest rate of something like 14%! He didn’t just wreck his own business, he pretty much wrecked Atlantic City as an east coast gambling Mecca a la Las Vegas.
But he’s done this over and over again, took a promising business model and wrecked it. He bought the modest little Eastern Shuttle, which businessmen liked for its hourly flights and no reservations requirement and low prices, and renamed it Trump, splashed gold paint all over everything, eliminated the convenience and jacked up the prices. It folded.
He bought into the US Football League, which was innovating spring football, and killed that too. (Any football fan Trump supporters in your family, tell them that if Trump hadn’t screwed it up, they could be watching football virtually year round today.) He bought a team, the league was new but developing nicely, and playing spring football – but Trump wanted to go into competition with the NFL (he really wanted an NFL team and thought this was the way to force a merger of the leagues), moved the USFL to play in the fall directly opposite the NFL, and of course the fans chose to follow the more familiar and established teams. So he killed that too.
Other people have good money-making ideas (though I personally despise casinos and think even wanting to own one is a bad sign about a person), and Trump elbows in and takes over and ruins it for himself and for everybody else.
Amir Khalid
@dmsilev:
@Anoniminous:
Thanks.
Ivan X
@Trentrunner: Well, this is the problem the GOP has now — a pol like Christie could win the general, but the Republican primary voters seem to want total belligerence 24/7. Or, as DougJ said, the guy who rocks the hardest.
hovercraft
@James E Powell:
Halpren did tell Chucky that the story is overblown and not the blockbuster the Times thinks it is. Amy Walters and Starbursts agree. So stop celebrating liberals, since Trump was an insider and took advantage of it, he is the one who could come in and fix it.
Brachiator
@Eric U.: Possible source of “good news for John McCain.” A McCain surrogate on the ABC Sunday pundits show.
Oh, those were such innocent times.
different-church-lady
@hovercraft: it’s good news for John McCain all the way down.
JPL
@dmsilev: He won’t debate again.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@dmsilev:
Also losses in New York real estate.
And it appears that the number includes losses from previous years. The $916 billion number represents the status of the net operating loss for 1995, because that’s the year for which information has come to light. I don’t think it necessarily means that the entire amount was lost in calendar year 1995.
hovercraft
@Ivan X:
As a constituent who never voted for him, I’ve always been impressed by his ability to gish gallop people into buying his crap. Unfortunately too late we have buyers remorse, but it’s too late, we lost the new Hudson tunnel, property taxes are still too high, Port Authority is a disaster, he’s fucked up the public pensions, he’s screwed everyone and everything he’s touched. The media may still buy his shit, but he is supported by around 27 to 30 % of his constituents. Hmm that number……
Villago Delenda Est
@PPCLI: When one is looting one’s own public corporation, and sticking the bill to one’s shareholders, one’s banks, one’s contractors, and one’s employees, it’s easy. One just have to have no sense of ethics or decency.
That’s our Donald.
JPL
@hovercraft: Well at least Trump received a 25 million dollar tax break.
dmsilev
@JPL: I guess we’ll know for sure in a week, but I think he doesn’t have any real choice but to show up. He got his ass handed to him in the first debate and everyone not currently sequestered in a remote Amazon tribal village will call him a coward who is afraid to face the girl who beat him the first time. Think of what that would do, for instance, to the enthusiasm of his deplorables.
sinnedbackward
@EthylEster: Seems it was accumulated losses over several years in the early to mid-nineties from his three Atlantic City cas!nos, his vanity airline, and his badly timed purchase of the Plaza hotel. At least that is the speculation at online news sites.
Also, if he later had any of those losses forgiven in the corporate bankruptcies, and did not subsequently declare the forgivenesses as income, it is tax fraud (I read). But since he securitized so much of his debt in the restructurings resulting from the huge losses, it gets into tax law territory that is hugely complex.
hovercraft
@Eric U.:
Good news for John McCain was Mark Halpern’s signature line back in 2008. No matter how counterintuitive, everything you thought was good for Obama was actually, good news ……….
hovercraft
@EthylEster:
Atlantic City, overpaying for the Plaza Hotel, and Trump Airlines. Basically everything he touched turned to shit.
Joyce H
(Why am I in moderation?)
Hob
@dmsilev: Yeah, I don’t think Halperin used the exact words “good news for McCain”, but he famously argued that if Obama dared to say negative things about McCain and especially if he mentioned real estate, that would backfire because there are so many potential Obama scandals like… Obama might have helped Tony Rezko make money on some property. Basically, Halperin being Halperin, he was totally unconcerned with what this actually meant about McCain as a candidate or as a person, and was just blathering about campaign strategy and hoping for someone to give him some juicy gossip soon. It wasn’t the only ridiculous thing he’d ever said, but it was blatant enough to make it easy for the “good news for McCain” joke to catch on.
debbie
@Iowa Old Lady:
They were around decades before Trump came along. He’s just their most recent version of a savior.
Suzanne
@MomSense: I design healthcare faciliti s, and I specialize in mental health facilities. We are seeing a mini-boom in construction of mental health facilities of various kinds (inpatient court-ordered, inpatient voluntary, sober living homes, observation and bridge units, geropsych, etc). So on the one hand, I feel optimistic. OTOH, the need has been so great for so long that even this is a drop in the bucket.
But I have absolutely zero sympathy for people like Trump and Rove and Palin who stoke this bullshit. The woman in the profile literally threatened the life of the POTUS. That should hang around all of their necks. That is absolutely completely horrifying.
NotMax
Natch, must be the best plywood.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@Joyce H:
You probably said (or quoted) casino.
James E Powell
@hovercraft:
I think we can use “This is actually a very, very good story for Donald Trump” in the same way and, obviously, I’m pushing it.
Stan
Should I sell my Trump action figure now or wait another six weeks?