Trump's tax returns

[Minoosh]

We also have the fact that the NYT would be subject to a defamation suit should they be publishing false information about Trump without the evidence to back it up and have a team of excellent lawyers who would have vetted all information. Gee.....let me see whom I would believe...the NYT or Trump....hmmm.....

On the lawsuit ... a defamation suit would be a tough sell. It's a very, very high bar if you're dealing with a public figure.

 

[Darat]

1. I doubt Trump thinks, much less that far ahead.
2. I doubt it will matter. Trump is not scared of getting caught in some paradoxical "gotcha" moment. He'll tell his supporters one thing, then turn and in the same breathe tell the IRS another, and he will not lose a second of sleep over it. Telling two things at once has worked for him so far, no reason to think it will stop.

I wasn’t meaning that it would cause him to lose support rather that out of his narcissism he will open himself up to prosecution for tax matters.

 

[JoeMorgue]

I wasn’t meaning that it would cause him to lose support rather that out of his narcissism he will open himself up to prosecution for tax matters.

Prosecution by who?

Only the Senate, SCOTUS, or, arguably, the Justice Department has any legal recourse against a standing President and Trump owns all three of them.

And if Trump is no longer the President and/or the Dems take the Senate come January his tax returns are going to be on way far down on the list of things they are going to after him on.

 

[Bob001]

On the lawsuit ... a defamation suit would be a tough sell. It's a very, very high bar if you're dealing with a public figure.

That's certainly true. But Trump has long used lawsuits as a tool of intimidation. Even if a suit gets thrown out, the target has to spend time and money defending himself. If/when he wins he might be awarded compensation for his expenses, but that's never guaranteed. Meanwhile, during the months, maybe years, that the suit winds its way through the courts, Trump can say "That guy's lying and I'm suing him for it!" Sounds good to his base.

 

[BobTheCoward]

I wasn’t meaning that it would cause him to lose support rather that out of his narcissism he will open himself up to prosecution for tax matters.

I saw something today saying the "willful" requirement of tax crimes really makes it difficult.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Abraham Lincoln paid 3x more in taxes in 1864 than Donald Trump in 2016. Not more as a share of his income. More in taxes. Lincoln paid $1981.67 in federal taxes in 1864-1865.

 

[Minoosh]

The error is in thinking that this is just one presidential administration like any other. Everything produced by this administration (particularly that which comes directly from Trump or his spokespeople) should be treated as if it were coming straight out of Baghdad Bob's mouth* & tentatively dismissed until it can otherwise be confirmed.


* Heck, Baghdad Bob probably couldn't compete with Trump when it comes to untrustworthiness.

I've detected in some Trump allies a reluctance to utter factually incorrect sentences. IIRC Bill Barr for a while, and Kavanaugh danced around quite a few questions not only from the hearings but from Fox News. Can't remember right now what the exact issue was, but I'd remember if I looked at a transcript. Trump doesn't exercise that degree of prudence.

A lot of times I do see claims of lies that don't stand up to scrutiny. People can imply all kinds of things without saying anything outright. Pompeo didn't lie when he said, "It is worth noting that Bangladesh is NOT Ukraine." But his implication was that a reporter couldn't find Ukraine on a map.

I spent a career cutting through manipulative use of language like this. "It is worth noting" is one of those wonderful clauses that allows people to throw out technically correct whoppers. Passive voice is another way to do this. "Last I checked." I've often thought of compiling a list of "top 100 clauses that will allow you to Technically Not Lie." I sometimes envy people who can pull this crap off because I can't.

One poster, now departed, wound people up for pages and pages saying Trump didn't "promise" to release his tax returns, because he never uttered the word "promise." I am so literal about this stuff that I probably would not claim he promised, either. I'd find another way to say it. I'm a little nuts that way. But colloquially, if you say, "Absolutely I will (do something)," that's a promise.

 

[Minoosh]

Sarah Huckabee Sanders also did pretty well with the technique of Not Technically Lying when she said one thing about the U.S.-Mexico border, then segued into how thousands of terrorists had been caught trying to enter the U.S. But at that point, she was talking about airports. Chris Wallace nailed her on it. It takes persistence because people can get pretty damn good at that weaseling crap.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Some people are running full speed into the post-fact world, others are being dragged kicking and screaming and will hold on longer and tighter to the security blankets of pedantics and technicalities.

It makes no matter once they wind up there.

 

[Giordano]

Interestingly the N.Y. Times has released the data: the summaries of reported income, reported debts, reported deductions, for various aspects of the Trump empire for each year. They just haven’t released the many reams of individual details that probably run to hundreds of pages. If we had these details how would that make it more convincing? They could make that up too if they were making up stuff.

Most scientific manuscripts contain comparable summaries of the raw data, such as statistical means and variation analyses of individual data points from multiple experimental repeats.

In all cases the peers in peer review have to trust that the data presented, summaries or individually, were what the authors saw and that the experiments were performed as the authors said there were. As a peer reviewer I could look for suspicious results and ask for more detail but there was no way to check that lane one of the gel was loaded with the control and lane two with the kinase treated sample as the authors stated in the figure legend. There are no security cameras in labs peering over every experimentor’s shoulders when they prepared and ran each experiment. I had to trust the authors at that fundamental level.

Honestly the alleged contrast of anonymous sources vs. peer review science publications is bogus.

 

[BobTheCoward]

Some people are running full speed into the post-fact world, others are being dragged kicking and screaming and will hold on longer and tighter to the security blankets of pedantics and technicalities.

It makes no matter once they wind up there.

You seem more cynical lately. Everything (relatively) all right?

 

[JoeMorgue]

Honestly the alleged contrast of anonymous sources vs. peer review science publications is bogus.

Because distracting us into another subtopic is the only defense they have.

We know Trump drowned the man in the sparkling wine. The only thing left for his defenders to argue about is whether or not it was technically champagne.

 

[BobTheCoward]

Because distracting us into another subtopic is the only defense they have.

We know Trump drowned the man in the sparkling wine. The only thing left for his defenders to argue about is whether or not it was technically champagne.

Do you think I'm a defender? I can tell you I did not vote for him and do not plan to.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

That's quite the logical leap from "It came from the Phillipines" to "it came from Duterte", etc.

Oh my word! All three of those countries are dictatorships (including India currently). So where do you think the money came from? I don't think the Philippines has any more of Imelda's shoes to sell.

 

[BobTheCoward]

Interestingly the N.Y. Times has released the data: the summaries of reported income, reported debts, reported deductions, for various aspects of the Trump empire for each year. They just haven’t released the many reams of individual details that probably run to hundreds of pages. If we had these details how would that make it more convincing? They could make that up too if they were making up stuff.

Most scientific manuscripts contain comparable summaries of the raw data, such as statistical means and variation analyses of individual data points from multiple experimental repeats.

In all cases the peers in peer review have to trust that the data presented, summaries or individually, were what the authors saw and that the experiments were performed as the authors said there were. As a peer reviewer I could look for suspicious results and ask for more detail but there was no way to check that lane one of the gel was loaded with the control and lane two with the kinase treated sample as the authors stated in the figure legend. There are no security cameras in labs peering over every experimentor’s shoulders when they prepared and ran each experiment. I had to trust the authors at that fundamental level.

Honestly the alleged contrast of anonymous sources vs. peer review science publications is bogus.

Can you get the raw data?

 

[JoeMorgue]

Do you think I'm a defender? I can tell you I did not vote for him and do not plan to.

I'm sure your online persona "Has no opinion" about Trump.

 

[Ziggurat]

Now you're just being silly. Most of us use the terms interchangeably because we pay what we owe when we owe it, and we don't pay more than we owe if we don't have to.

Most people don't have very complex taxes, and when they do overpay they tend to get it back as a refund. Trump does have very complex taxes, and he didn't get back his overpayment as a refund.

The correct word might be overpaid. The fact is that he manipulated credits and deductions to reduce his actual tax due that year to $750, and he asked that his overpayments be credited to future years. He could probably have requested a fat refund, and if he didn't it's not clear why.

He used it as a carryover to apply to future taxes, because (get this) he expected his future taxes to be larger.

Which is why focusing on one or two years of his liability being really low is disingenuous.

And all that is without considering his exaggeration of his losses and expenses, like paying "consulting fees" to people who were his employees.

Kind of like the Clintons deducting their donation of used underwear?

If that wasn't kosher, then by all means, the IRS should go after him for it. But nobody here is in a position to really evaluate that.

 

[BobTheCoward]

I'm sure your online persona "Has no opinion" about Trump.

I give my opinion of him, regularly.

 

[Giordano]

Because distracting us into another subtopic is the only defense they have.

We know Trump drowned the man in the sparkling wine. The only thing left for his defenders to argue about is whether or not it was technically champagne.

I don’t even get the point of defending him here. His defenders agree he is a sleazy crook. It’s just trying to score points in a high school denationalized club. Or getting a rise from members such as myself.

 

[BobTheCoward]

I don’t even get the point of defending him here. His defenders agree he is a sleazy crook. It’s just trying to score points in a high school denationalized club. Or getting a rise from members such as myself.

There really isn't any purpose for these threads other than to score points. I don't think it is far out to say that the many people saying this is an indictment of Trump do not actually have some decision that will be affected by this information. This information is about as significant as trivia.