March 15, 2017

So Rachel Maddow's segment on Trump's 2005 Tax returns was pretty much a dud, but what came out of it was how quickly the Trump administration responded to the news, (whether they planted the story or not) and that the White House was willing to comment on Trump's taxes before Maddow's segment even aired.

The conservative media is giddy over the two pages from 2005 Trump return that Maddow received from David Cay Johnson, but it wasn't the entire return. They are fishing for scraps of news they can spin positively these days.

Their spin is that Trump did pay taxes so that destroys the entire quest for him to release his returns, even the ones that are not under audit.

That is preposterous, of course.

Washington Examiner's Sarah Westwood told Fox News the scoop was over-hyped, "It really fed president Trump's narrative that the left-leaning media is out to get him at any cost because this did appear to be a case of hyperbole for the sake of partisanship."

"And look in the long term, it actually undermines Democrats' argument that it is a matter of national security for Trump to release his tax returns. All along, Democrats have been suggesting that President Trump could be hiding something nefarious like tax delinquency or foreign debts, and that only the release of his tax returns could prove otherwise, but the fact that the first glimpse of his tax documents we got showed that actually, he was a faithful American taxpayer undercuts their ability to come, in the future, say that Trump is likely hiding something."

Westwood's analysis falls right into the pocket of the narrative Trump wants to promote, when in actuality, two pages from one tax return is nothing at all.

You can't base two decades of tax returns on a brief look at one year.

Adam Wollner got it right when he said, "So in the short term, you could call this a win for president Trump politically speaking. In the long term, this only provides us with more questions than answers."

If the Trump camp has nothing to hide, then why won't he release his tax returns?

It really is that simple.

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