On Wednesday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” the host breaks down The New York Times’ release of President Donald Trump’s tax information from over a decade ago. Knowles argues that while the media treated it like an exclusive, nothing new was revealed in the documents. Transcript and video below.
What are the conclusions of the documents? The conclusions are that for a little under a decade, Donald Trump paid a low tax rate. When you take into account losses, deductions and all these sorts of things he didn’t have a tax liability. The charitable view of that is that Donald Trump took major business losses. We know there was a huge downturn in New York real estate at that time. We know that the tax code was favorable toward real estate developers, toward people who were building things, so that seems pretty fair. The uncharitable read of that document is that Donald Trump cheated on his taxes, that he paid a rate that was too low. But this one is kind of hard to believe because Donald Trump is under audit currently, I believe, and he certainly was under audit two years ago. This is a very wealthy guy with a lot of business interests who has been audited. If he really underpaid on taxes one would expect that that would already be discovered by now.
Another takeaway is that Donald Trump had less money than he said he did for many years. Duh. Yeah of course, where have you been? This has always been the knock on Trump is that he brags about having more money than he does. Is that news?
The New York Times thinks this is a big story. They’ve been lobbying this attack on him for much more than three years. Then, you’ve got to wonder what do the Democrats get out of this? First of all, nobody cares about Donald Trump’s taxes, nobody cares about any politician’s taxes. This is just an attack that has come up over the past few decades for opposition research firms to launch more assaults on other candidates. Nobody cares. Public opinion shows this. People care about immigration, they care about jobs, they care about the economy. They do not care about the tax returns of some politician from 10 years ago. We got too much on our minds, this does not really matter.
Now, what else do Democrats get from this? They now get to highlight how Donald Trump fought his way back from a billion dollars of debt. A billion dollars of losses. Is that bad?
Democrats get now to push the narrative that Trump has tried to push for 30 years. People like that. It exposes a lot of the elitism of the mainstream media. When this came out one of the trends that was going on Twitter said Donald Trump shouldn’t have hosted The Apprentice, he should have hosted The Biggest Loser. They’re making fun of Trump because he took some big risks in business and had some big losses and then made a lot of his money back. First of all, does anyone actually believe Donald Trump is not a wealthy man right now? I know some people try to say that and say he’s not as rich as he says he is. Okay fine. Certainly, we all can agree that Donald Trump is a very wealthy man right now and has been for at least the last 15 years.
The New York Times, they say, “Ha ha, he wasn’t a billionaire for ten years. Oh, Jeeves pour me a little more port, please. We’re making fun of how Donald from Queens — you know he has that outer burrow accent; he wasn’t even a billionaire for the early 90s. This is how we’re going to win votes from those plebeians in New York City.” They’re portraying themselves as rich uncle penny bags over here. They’re portraying themselves as the guy on the Monopoly box. That’s not a good way to connect to the American people. Totally botched hit. Whoever leaked it really does seem to have backfired here.
I’d like to think that it was Republicans who leaked this document because it’s a great troll and you know at this moment in time Republicans are really good at trolling the media and Democrats. If it wasn’t the Republicans, who leaked this if it wasn’t Trump himself if it wasn’t like kind of a media dirty hit — if this actually was leaked from the government, this is a major crime. To leak someone’s private tax return information is a very serious crime. Certainly, an investigation should take place and whoever is responsible for it should be held to account, unless it was Trump himself. Whoever actually committed a crime of stealing this information should be held to account. This is really bad.
We attack Wikileaks for hacking into the government and releasing information that should not be released and rightly so. How is this that much different? You have somebody going into our federal government stealing information, leaking it to the media and publishing it to damage not only a politician, not only a candidate, but the President of the United States. That’s a big deal. That’s a very big deal.