Op-Ed Columnist |
| House Democrats may not be able to force President Trump to release his tax returns. But the Democrats can keep reminding Americans that Trump really does not want the public to know what’s in those returns. |
| As you probably know by now, all other recent presidents (and presidential nominees) voluntarily released their tax information. Trump has not. Now House Democrats are trying to get access to that information and potentially release portions of it to the public. |
| Last week, Richard Neal, Democrat of Massachussets and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, demanded to see six years of Trump’s tax returns, citing a 1924 provision in the tax code that gives Congress the power to obtain any citizen’s returns. Neal has given the Internal Revenue Service until Wednesday to hand over the returns to Congress. |
| Trump has repeatedly said that he would be happy to release his returns publicly, but that’s clearly been a lie. One of his excuses has been the false claim that he can’t release them because he is being audited by the I.R.S. And over the weekend, his administration stopped pretending Trump was telling the truth. Democrats will “never” see them, said Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, on Fox News yesterday. “Nor should they.” Trump’s lawyers have said they will fight the request. |
| Why is Trump so afraid of letting people see his tax returns? |
| The most innocent possibility is that he isn’t nearly as wealthy as he has long boasted, and he’s embarrassed by the truth. A less innocent possibility is that he has financial ties that could create political problems for him if those ties became public — for example, ties to Russia or other countries to which his foreign policy has been suspiciously friendly. |
| The release of the returns would let “Americans decide whether the president is making decisions that benefit his businesses at the expense of American taxpayers,” Aaron Scherb of Common Cause, the government watchdog group, has written in USA Today. “If Trump has significant debt to banks and/or individuals in certain countries, some of which might be adversaries of the United States, we must know because his foreign policy decisions might be compromised.” |
| Seeing the president’s tax returns isn’t a matter of prurient gossip or mere partisan politics. It’s a matter of national interest. So long as Trump is fighting the release, Democrats should keep talking about it. |
