Over the weekend, the New York Times revealed that Donald Trump exploited a legal loophole that allowed him to declare a nearly billion dollar loss on his 1995 tax returns, potentially enabling the Republican presidential candidate to have dodged paying federal taxes for up to 18 years.
This revelation lines up with an improvised remark Trump made during last week’s presidential debate while Clinton was criticizing him for refusing to pay taxes, with Trump interrupting her to say “That makes me smart.”
However, Trump didn’t seem to think it was smart for lower income people to do the same thing. In a 2011 interview with Fox News, Trump railed against tax-dodgers. He said:
Well, I don’t mind sacrificing for the country to be honest with you. But you know, you do have a problem because half of the people don’t pay any tax. And when he’s talking about that he’s talking about people that aren’t also working, that are not contributing to this society. And it’s a problem. But we have 50 percent. It just hit the 50 percent mark. Fifty percent of the people are paying no tax.
The 50% statistic was an oft-repeated Republican talking point during that election. The truth, however, was that 50% of Americans did not pay federal taxes because they were not making enough money to be required to pay them. These Americans still paid other taxes such as Social Security, property taxes, and others.
Trump apparently was so concerned that some Americans weren’t paying their fair share that he continued to repeat this misleading talking point many times over the years on social media and on various Fox News interviews:
“You do have a large percentage of people not paying taxes,” Trump said on Fox News later that year. “You do have a large percentage of people that feel they’re entitled.”
As recently as 2015, Trump appeared on Hannity and repeated the tax-dodging criticism:
The problem we have right now—we have a society that sits back and says we don’t have to do anything. Eventually, the 50 percent cannot carry—and it’s unfair to them—but cannot carry the other 50 percent.
The Trump campaign has denied the New York Times allegations about his taxes, using the occasion to insult the newspaper while also suggesting that Hillary is more crooked than Richard Nixon. In statement, the campaign claimed that Trump “has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes, sales and excise taxes, real estate taxes, city taxes, state taxes, employee taxes and federal taxes, along with very substantial charitable contributions.”
However, the only way to truly prove these claims would be for Trump to release his tax returns, as every presidential candidate has done since (ironically) Richard Nixon. Despite continued criticism, he has refused, saying that he is not allowed to do so because he is currently in the midst of an IRS audit.
The IRS has said repeatedly that being the subject of an audit does not prevent anyone from publicly releasing their tax returns.
