The New York Times Exposes Trumps Tax Returns. They also Expose No Connections to Russia.

There is no question that this is scandalous, but it shouldn’t be shocking.

On Sunday night the New York Times dropped a bombshell report on Donald Trump’s tax returns revealing that the President has paid no taxes in 10 of the last 15 years and paid just $750 in 2016 and 2017. According to the Times, Trump’s tax information:

“shows his finances under stress, beset by losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes and hundreds of millions of debt coming due,”

There is no question that this is scandalous, but it shouldn’t be shocking. Liberals will use this information as yet another example of how Trump is corrupt and bad and they are correct in that statement. What they fail to understand however is the fact that there is a bipartisan consensus on allowing corporations and wealthy individuals to avoid paying their fair share in taxes, or simply avoid paying taxes altogether.

For example, according to a report by NBC News based on an analysis by the Institution on Taxation and Economic Policy:

“The report covers 379 companies from the Fortune list that were profitable in 2018 and finds that 91 paid an effective federal tax rate of 0% or less. Those companies come from a wide range of industries and include the likes of Amazon, Starbucks, and Chevron.”

In a recent article, journalist David Sirota further exposed this trend:

“The first report came from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which found that between 2011 and 2013, $381 billion of taxes went unpaid every single year. Couple that data with recent Harvard University research showing that the top 1 percent of income earners are responsible for 70 percent of the tax gap, and you see the full picture: The wealthiest sliver of the population is depriving the American public of about $266 billion of owed tax revenue every year.”

These corporations that continuously evade paying taxes are among the largest donors to both the Democratic and Republican parties. It should be obvious why they’re allowed to get away with these crimes year after year.

Similar to how liberals will refuse to understand that Trump getting away with tax fraud is a symptom of a problem that is supported by both political parties, they’ll also refuse to acknowledge the fact that this report exposes no connections between Donald Trump and Russia. Hidden within a single sentence of the bombshell New York Times report, the Times stated:

"As President, [Trump] has received more money from foreign sources and United States interest groups than previously known. The records do not reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia”

If you’ve been able to maintain your sanity, or whatever is left of it over the last four years this should be obvious. Corporate media that cater to the neoliberal class like CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times have all pushed a non-stop message since Trump’s election that he is an agent of the Kremlin who was elected because of Russian interference in our elections. When asked to produce evidence to back up these claims they point to a variety of accounts on social media and numerous now-debunked reports by American media outlets. This includes a report by a company called “Crowdstrike” that initially kicked-off the Russia investigation, but whose President, Shawn Henry, admitted under oath in testimony to congress in 2017 that the company had no concrete evidence that Russia hacked into the Democratic National Committee in 2016.

This now-debunked report by Crowdstrike which alleged that Russia hacked into the DNC in 2016 to steal emails from top party officials like Hillary Clinton and John Podesta and then send them to Wikileaks to be published was paid for by DNC operatives and was one of the main sources of evidence used to start the investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

According to reporting by Aaron Matè, who has been one of the leading journalists working to expose Russiagate as a fraud:

“[When] Asked for the date when alleged Russian hackers stole data from the DNC server, Henry testified that Crowdstrike did not in fact know if such theft occured at all”

For example, Henry said under oath:

“There’s not evidence that they were actually exfiltrated. There’s curcumstancial evidence but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated”

Even as the source of this scandal has admitted to having no concrete evidence to back up their original claim of Russian hacking, that hasn’t stopped mainstream figureheads in the Democratic Party and mainstream media from repeating the claims that Trump is an asset of Russia on repeat 24/7. This past February Hillary Clinton was quoted on the red carpet before the debut of her documentary on Hulu saying:

“Obviously we know the Russians are continuing to try to choose our next President like they chose our last President.”

Even Bernie Sanders has embraced the language of Russiagate. In a recent interview he stated:

“In the United States the President does not determine who can or cannot vote or what ballots will be counted. That maybe what his friend Putin does in Russia…but it is not and it will not be done in America.”

There are so many instances of the mainstream media freaking out over Russian interference that had no basis in reality that Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept was able to compile some of the worst Russiagate media failures into an article that can be found here. I highly suggest you check it out.

If this is new information to you, you might be asking yourself ‘why would the Democrats lie about Russiagate?’ The answer is simple. After losing the 2016 election to the faux-populist clown that is Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and the entire Democratic establishment needed an excuse for why they lost the election that didn’t involve addressing the flaws in her campaign and the corruption within the Democratic Party in general.

The Democrats lost the Presidency in 2016 because they refused to campaign in rust belt states that have been destroyed by bad trade deals supported by both parties while campaigning on another bad trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Democrats were forced to distance themselves from TPP after they let Trump get to the left of them on trade and make them seem like they were going to continue outsourcing. During a debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016 Trump said:

“Your husband signed NAFTA which is one of the worst things to ever happen to the manufacturing industry. You go to New England, you go to Ohio, Pennsylvania, you go anywhere you want Secretary Clinton and you will see devistation…And now you want to approve TPP…”

This is just a single example of how the Democratic Party failed to properly run against Trump in 2016, leading to his victory because he was able to fool enough desperate Americans into thinking he’d be working in their interests. The reality is that even though Trump ran on a message of stopping outsourcing, in his first year in office U.S. companies shipped even more jobs overseas than during Obama’s last year in office. In fact, according to employment data gathered by Good Jobs Nation and the watchdog group Public Citizen federal contractors alone outsourced more than 100,000 jobs while receiving more than $19 million in government contract money.

According to a report by InHomelandSecurity.com:

“A November 2017 report prepared by George Faraday for Good Jobs Nation found no evidence that the Trump Administration has done anything to halt, or even slow, the outsourcing of American jobs by federal contractors. In fact, under his watch, contractor outsourcing has risen to record levels.”

The same report states:

“Since Trump became President, the labor department certified that more than 93,000 jobs have been lost to outsourcing. That is a slightly higher figure than the average of about 87,000 in the preceding five years.”

It’s easy to expose Trump as a corrupt hypocritical leader who has no legitimacy to represent the public, unfortunately, the Democratic establishment wasn’t able to do that in 2016, and they’re making the same mistakes again in 2020. It’s much easier for the Democratic Party to ignore their own corruption that enabled Trump to get elected in the first place and blame his election on Russian interference than it is to admit that they’ve been complicit in the corruption that led to Trump’s election to begin with. Choosing to blame Russia rather than themselves absolves the elitist pricks who control the Democratic Party from admitting any fault in the loss of the 2016 election. If the Democratic Party was able to acknowledge their own corruption they wouldn’t be running the same failed strategy that lost them in the election in 2016 again in 2020.

Once again the Democratic Party is running against Trump with heavy rhetoric, but the same corrupt neoliberal policies that lost them the election last time to shame the left into submission while catering to the interests of moderate Republicans who no longer support Trump. These so-called “never Trump” Republicans make up a tiny portion of the population compared to people who don’t vote.

The Democratic Party needs to understand that when they lose it won’t be because leftists were too selfish and obsessed with ideological purity. It’s because the Democratic Party refuses to support transformative universal policies that would benefit poor and working-class Americans. If Joe Biden and the Democrats actually wanted to win this election they wouldn’t be supporting fracking in the midst of a climate crisis, they wouldn’t be advocating for increased funding to the police in the midst of the largest protest movement against over-policing in American history, they wouldn’t be telling their wealthy donors that “nothing will fundamentally change”. If they were serious about winning this election they would be supporting Medicare for All in the middle of a pandemic rather than threatening to veto it even if it was passed by Congress. The move to blame Trump’s victory in 2016 on selfish leftists rather than take the time to address the corruption within the Democratic Party & our government in general only makes it more likely for the same mistakes to be made again in 2020, leading to another Trump victory.

The Democratic Party would see outstanding political outcomes if they started trying to appeal to the majority of the nation that doesn’t vote rather than fighting over the same small portion of the electorate that they’re unlikely to win over. Both parties usually end up fighting over the same moderate portion of the electorate every election cycle because that’s all the corporations and wealthy individuals who influence politics will allow. Non-voters make up a majority of the population, a majority of the population supports transformative universal policies like Medicare for All, eliminating student debt, free public college; they support ending the wars and bringing our troops home, they support getting money out of politics, ending mass surveillance, ending the war on drugs, spending more on social programs and less on militarizing law enforcement and fighting endless wars, they support holding the government and corporations accountable, but neither political party supports any of these things in any meaningful way.