Some of the Politicalwire follow up stuff from around the media….
The New York Times dropped the next installment of its series on President Trump’s leaked tax returns.
“While the story of The Apprentice is by now well known, the president’s tax returns reveal another grand twist that has never been truly told — how the popularity of that fictional alter ego rescued him, providing a financial lifeline to reinvent himself yet again. And then how, in an echo of the boom-and-bust cycle that has defined his business career, he led himself toward the financial shoals he must navigate today.”
“Mr. Trump’s genius, it turned out, wasn’t running a company. It was making himself famous — Trump-scale famous — and monetizing that fame.”
“Republican lawmakers reacted with nearly complete silence on Monday to a New York Times investigation that revealed President Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017 and that he oversees a network of businesses that are riddled with debt and losing hundreds of millions of dollars,” the New York Times reports.
Michael Cohen told MSNBC that President Trump could be “very realistically facing a potential bankruptcy” but “the more likely scenario that I see is that he’ll find some corrupt foreign entity to help him out of the situation.”
David Frum: “First, it melts Trump’s support a little more. Trump’s hopes for 2020 depended on fantastic overperformance with white voters without college degrees. He’s lost so much support elsewhere that he must hold every last member of his core group. He doesn’t need to decline much among these voters to convert any faint hope of success into certainty of disaster.”
“Second, and perhaps more important, the ink-on-paper confirmation of Trump’s indebtedness, tax dodging, and all-around crookedness will get into Trump’s head. His political project through the pandemic has been to mess with his opponents by hurling one crazy distraction after another. Now, suddenly, it’s his own decision loop that has been disrupted. On the preexisting trajectory of the 2020 campaign, Trump was going to lose—and probably lose big. He needed something to happen either to help him or, more plausibly, to push the Biden camp into some mistake or misstep. Now the banana peels have been dumped beneath his own feet.”
President Trump on Monday claimed he had paid “many millions of dollars in taxes” and has “very little debt” after a bombshell report in The New York Timesrevealed he had paid effectively no income taxes over several years, and is facing more than $300 million in looming loan repayments, the CNBC reports.
But Trump, in his tweet making that claim, did not offer proof and conspicuously did not say he had paid millions of dollars in “income taxes.”
For members: Why the Trump Tax Story Could Finally Move the Polls
Trump sought deals with Moscow mayor…
In a meandering press conference on Sunday, President Donald Trump repeatedly accused his Democratic opponent’s son, Hunter Biden, of receiving millions of dollars from the wife of Moscow’s late mayor Yury Luzhkov, asking why “nobody even has any question about it.”
But Trump himself sought to do business with Luzhkov’s government in the late 1990s, according to press reports from the time, SEC filings and comments made by Luzhkov last year. His attempts to build an underground mall in Moscow and renovate two major hotels there were part of a broader push to secure high-profile real-estate deals in Russia, which Trump was still pursuing as recently as 2016 with a proposal for a Trump Tower Moscow.
Still, Trump claimed again on Sunday that he “didn’t have anything to do with Russia.”
“I didn’t know about Moscow,” Trump said when asked whether he’d confront Joe Biden about the alleged payments to Hunter. “Three and a half million dollars from the mayor’s wife. I didn’t know about that. And he’s a very influential, powerful man in Russia, as you know. And it wasn’t me; I didn’t have anything to do with Russia. That came out loud and clear.”…
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