Trump and his billion dollar losses

So the super successful billionaire businessman Donald Trump suffered huge losses over a ten-year period according to revelations in The New York Times today. His companies lost more than $1 billion between 1985 and 1994. In that period he only paid income tax twice, in 1987 and 1988. No wonder Trump has been insisting he is never going to make his tax contributions public. Whenever questioned about it he or his lawyers or accountants always say his companies are still being audited. There were suspicions that as Trump seemed reluctant to broadcast the amount of tax he had paid, his accountants must have arranged some cunning tax-avoidance scheme. Voters paying their taxes wouldn't have liked that of their president. But not paying tax because of huge business losses is something else. That doesn't sit well with a president who likes to boast how successful he has been in his life. The fact that some, if not many, of his companies have gone bankrupt over time is not new. But the £1 billion losses over ten years is a bit of a revelation. The New York Times clearly has some well-informed and well-positioned sources in the Inland Revenue Service who have fed the information to its reporters. It was inevitable that it would come out eventually. Everything is leaked in Washington. Nothing is sacred. But as I have argued before I think it is only right that the president of the United States should be totally open about everything in his life, from his tax contributions to his visits to doctors. When a president has things to hide, then newspapers will find him out in due course. But there is something extraordinary about Trump. No matter what dirt is thrown at him, whether by investigative newspapers or by his political opponents, nothing really seems to stick. He just shrugs it off and so do his loyal supporters. So, despite my enthusiasm for Senator Kamala Harris as the potential Democratic presidential candidate, and the favourable poll findings for Joe Biden, currently very much in the lead among the 20 candidates, neither is going to beat Trump just by attacking him for all his faults. Outside Washington, no one seems to care. The tax revelations will make headlines for a day or so, and will then get forgotten.