Tag: Donald Trump
IRS asleep at the wheel on Trump audits, House tax writers say
“The IRS didn’t audit the personal tax returns filed by former President Donald Trump during his first two years in office, despite an agency program that mandates scrutiny of every president’s tax information, a House committee said”
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“the agency did not initiate an audit of any of the returns that Trump filed while in office until April 3, 2019. That was the same day that committee Chair Richard Neal (D-Mass.) first asked IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig to provide Neal six years of Trump’s tax returns and any audits of those returns.
Only one such examination — that of the former president’s 2016 return — was flagged as a mandatory president audit. And three personal tax returns that Trump filed while in office for tax years 2017, 2018 and 2019 weren’t selected for scrutiny until after he left the White House.
The report reveals glaring problems for a program that is supposed to assure Americans that the president is abiding by the law, Joe Thorndike, a longtime tax historian, said.”
Trump’s income taxes were often paltry, newly released documents show
“Trump frequently made tens of millions of dollars annually during that period. But he was able to whittle away his tax bill by claiming steep business losses that offset that income.
In 2016, he paid $750. The following year he again paid just $750. In 2020, he paid nothing.”
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“In other years, Trump paid more. In 2018, he had far fewer losses to report and ended up paying $999,466.”
‘He’s Got a Huge Problem’
“Those who know Pence best say he is wrestling with how to recalibrate himself to a Republican base that hasn’t yet forgiven him for refusing Trump’s pressure to overturn the election results — and maybe never will. When you’ve buried your true self for four years in service to someone who happens to be the most divisive and unpopular former president since Richard Nixon, it’s not so easy to excavate yourself again. Pence, who describes himself as a “conservative, but not in a bad mood about it,” likes to be liked. “He would love to be reconciled to the president,” a confidant told me. “My sense is he’s seen that window close.” But neither is Pence willing to take the other path, reject the base who held his life in such low regard, and full-throatedly present himself as the man who saved democracy. “He’s not,” the confidant told me, “going to go Liz Cheney.””
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“In July of 2016, Trump picked Pence to be his running mate and automatically resurrected Pence’s political career. Pence repaid his benefactor with four years of nearly unswerving loyalty. When Trump put his water bottle down in a FEMA meeting briefing on the 2018 hurricane season, so did Pence. Pence took to describing the president in physically glowing terms, referring regularly to his “broad shoulders.” In one Cabinet meeting, he praised Trump once every 12 seconds for three minutes straight. “I had always been loyal to President Donald Trump,” the prologue of his book begins. “He was my president, and he was my friend.”
“When he became vice president, he knew that he had to subordinate his views,” Jim Atterholt, Pence’s former gubernatorial chief of staff who would later set up Pence’s legal defense fund during the Russia investigation, told me. “That doesn’t mean he didn’t have private conversations with the president where he shared concerns, but in public, he always subordinated his views. People saw that as being obsequious. But really, he was just being Mike Pence, which is a loyal vice president.”
From afar, Boehner, who himself thought he knew the bounds of Pence’s loyalty, having been the object of it when they served in the House together, marveled. “You know, there’s loyalty and then there’s, frankly, blind loyalty, which is what he exhibited as vice president because he had hundreds of opportunities to say, ‘We’re not really quite in the same place,’ or even raise an eyebrow for God’s sake.”
Boehner watched Pence stand by Trump through a number of imbroglios: Pence didn’t turn on Trump amid the “Access Hollywood” scandal, declining to usurp him on the ticket. In his book, he almost congratulated Trump for how he handled the fallout, writing that during the presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump “squared his shoulders” and “apologized to the American people.” He stood by Trump when the president said there were “good people on both sides” at the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. He defended the administration’s response to Covid, writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal headlined “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave.’” (Pence writes in his book that editors “placed a somewhat misleading headline on the essay.”) And he defended Trump’s decision to clear Lafayette Square of protesters, writing that he “watched as the media went wild, suggesting that the U.S. Park Police had tear-gassed protesters.”
Was Boehner disappointed in his old charge? I asked. “No, because I know the role of vice president. And when you’re the No. 2 guy, you salute the No. 1 guy.”
Still, Boehner added: “I sat back and watched this, going back to October of 2016,” — when the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape dropped — “and I’m thinking to myself, ‘My God, when is Pence going to say something because he can’t be this loyal.’ He was. And he was loyal every single day to Trump. I marveled through all of this, although looking back, I should’ve known he would be. And then he was directly loyal to the Constitution on Jan. 6.””
A notorious Trump judge just fired the first shot against birth control
“This is not a new argument, and numerous courts have rejected similar challenges to publicly funded family planning programs, in part because the Deanda plaintiff’s legal argument “would undermine the minor’s right to privacy” which the Supreme Court has long held to include a right to contraception.
But Kacsmaryk isn’t like most other judges. In his brief time on the bench — Trump appointed Kacsmaryk in 2019 — he has shown an extraordinary willingness to interpret the law creatively to benefit right-wing causes.
This behavior is enabled, moreover, by the procedural rules that frequently enable federal plaintiffs in Texas to choose which judge will hear their case — 95 percent of civil cases filed in Amarillo, Texas’s federal courthouse are automatically assigned to Kacsmaryk. So litigants who want their case to be decided by a judge with a history as a Christian right activist, with a demonstrated penchant for interpreting the law flexibly to benefit his ideological allies, can all but ensure that outcome by bringing their lawsuit in Amarillo.”
Making the GOP Liberty-Friendly Requires More Than Just Rejecting Donald Trump
“So if the Republican Party finally rejects Trump, is that also a rejection of the authoritarian and illiberal impulses his political career has amplified? I’m open to being pleasantly surprised, but so far, the evidence answers with a resounding “no.” Even if Trump loses this primary race, there’s every reason to think his party will retain its present will to power.
At The Bulwark this week, Jonathan V. Last documented a telling contrast between Republicans’ rationales for rejecting Trump now and their original objections to his candidacy in 2015 and 2016. Back then, GOP critiques of Trump were grounded in language about policy and governing principles or personal character, or both. Now the repudiation is openly transactional: Trump loses, and Republicans don’t want to lose.”
What Trump vs. DeSantis says about the future of the American right
“a DeSantis victory in 2024 would not, in any sense, represent a return to Republican pre-Trump normalcy or the triumph of the “traditional GOP,” as some observers see it.
The Florida governor, who won a blowout victory in his reelection bid..is not a Republican cut from the Bush-Cheney-Romney cloth. He represents an evolution of Trumpism, a new way of channeling the illiberal populist forces unleashed by the former president’s rise to power in 2016.”
His ascendancy as Trump’s principal challenger represents not the return of the GOP establishment, but its adaptation to the insurgency that defeated it six years ago. His model is less John McCain or Mitt Romney, the last two GOP nominees before Trump, than Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban — a leader who, after being elected in 2010, proceeded to use his right-wing populist ideology as a cover for authoritarian power grabs.
This is not to say that Trump and DeSantis are identical. In fact, they represent two related but distinct versions of American right-wing populism: Trump its wild id, DeSantis its more calculating and intellectualized ego. If one looks closely at which prominent conservatives and media voices are backing which candidate, these subtle distinctions become clearer — pointing to the different ways that these two figures threaten liberal-democratic norms.
These distinctions are real, important, and, as an intellectual matter, quite interesting. But they should not obscure what this matchup really represents.
DeSantis versus Trump is not normalcy versus radicalism. It’s American Orbánism versus the berserk.”
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“DeSantis’s Trumpism, like the original flavor, contained a healthy dose of hostility to basic liberal-democratic norms. After Florida voters passed a ballot initiative in 2018 that would end felon disenfranchisement, DeSantis signed a bill that would require felons to pay outstanding fines in order to vote — a poll tax, in effect, linked to debts so opaque and/or punitive that many could not feasibly pay them. In 2020, the ACLU argued that his law would functionally disenfranchise “hundreds of thousands” Floridians.
While not explicitly declaring the 2020 election stolen, DeSantis will not condemn “stop the steal” conspiracy theories when asked by reporters. He campaigned for hardcore deniers like Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano and, on the anniversary of the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack, downplayed its severity and mocked the media for continuing to focus on the day’s events. In advance of the 2022 elections, he allocated over a million dollars in state funds to a new police unit dedicated to investigating “voter fraud,” including violations of his pay-to-vote bill. The squad found virtually no actual crime but may have worked to deter lawful voters from showing up at the polls.
When Florida’s state legislature drew fairer election maps for the House in 2022, DeSantis vetoed them — demanding more Republican-tilted maps. He got what he wanted, delivering a multi-seat rightward swing”
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“Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth warned that DeSantis’s governing record in Florida resembles some steps that “electoral authoritarians” like Orbán use to consolidate power. Chenoweth is most concerned by the efforts to disenfranchise felons and crack down on “voter fraud,” but notes a number of other troubling examples:
“DeSantis also signed a law that aggressively restricts the ability of people to submit others’ absentee ballots, which upended long-standing community organizations’ efforts to make it easier for working people and people with disabilities to vote. Along with partisan redistricting that dramatically reduces competition and representation, limits on expression in public schools, harsh penalties for various forms of protest, and trafficking immigrants as a political stunt with impunity, for example, we can see the hallmarks of electoral authoritarianism.”
The comparison to Hungary is not mere liberal slander. Rod Dreher, a prominent conservative pundit and one of Orbán’s biggest stateside fans, has suggested that “maybe Florida is becoming our American Hungary.” Not coincidentally, Dreher concluded after the midterms that “DeSantis’s smashing Florida victory last night makes him the head of the conservative movement.”
In this, Dreher is speaking for a broad swath of so-called “national conservative” or “New Right” intellectuals: the pundits and academics who have dedicated themselves to theorizing a new kind of American conservatism compatible with the populist sentiment unleashed by Trump. This corner of the right, where the culture war is paramount and Orbán is seen as a model, believes DeSantis better embodies the qualities they admired in Trump.”
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“The substance of the arguments for Trump or DeSantis is in some ways less revealing than the identity of the advocates themselves. On the one hand, you have those on the right who dream of Budapest on the Potomac; on the other, congressional bomb-throwers who enjoy nothing more than battling the left under the ring lights. Each represents a different vision of how to challenge the American political status quo, to pull it in a more illiberal and less democratic direction.
Elements of this radicalism have always been a part of the conservative movement. Prior to Trump, there was a sense among many that the “responsible” elite could prevent things from going too far.
That they are now backing a figure as illiberal as DeSantis proves that this guardrail has completely fallen off — if it was ever in place to begin with.”
Why a second Trump term would be even more dangerous than his first
“Should Trump win, it would be a mistake to assume a second Trump term would roughly resemble the first. In that first term, Trump heavily relied for his appointments on the “Republican establishment,” including many officials who did try at least somewhat to rein in his most extreme or corrupt impulses. Since, he’s become more reliant on extreme advisers who have little interest in the norms of liberal democracy. That means a second-term Trump could well be far more successful at actually doing the corrupt things he always wanted to do.”
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“He’d also return to power with a different party. Since Trump’s initial rise to power, the GOP has gradually been remaking itself in his image. Many of his most outspoken critics have since retired, lost primary challenges, or even become his staunch supporters. Most Republicans who were appalled at Trump’s disrespect for the norms of liberal democracy are either no longer in the party or no longer so outspoken.”
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“So Trump and his team may well become more skilled at identifying, appointing, and empowering officials who would act in Trump’s personal interests, even if it means defying law or tradition. Indeed, his recent legal peril will make that of paramount personal importance to him.
There’s every reason, then, to expect a second Trump term would be far more tumultuous than the first — and that it could lead the country, and our democracy, to some totally unprecedented places. The stakes are high, and the battle for America’s future has begun.”