2016 Oct 3^rd

The “Times” has a copy of Trump’s tax returns and, due to clever tax lawyers. he pays no income tax and has paid none for several years. At first his campaign insisted that he had to pay the minimum tax for fiduciary reasons because the shareholders in his companies could sue him if he didn’t. You may remember that he said not long ago that he couldn’t release his tax returns because he was being audited. Then the head of the IRS blew that apart by telling us that the IRS had no problem with those being audited releasing their returns. Now the fiduciary responsibility to pay the minimum tax also blows up because these are his personal tax returns, not the tax returns of any business. It seems that we can only be certain that Trump is not misleading us, or lying to us, if he is asleep.

At the end of his debate Trump made some comments about the Clinton’s various marital problems resulting from Bill Clinton’s affairs and Hillary’s spirited attacks on his paramours. These attacks are used by the Trump campaign to demonstrate that Hillary Clinton is not really concerned about women’s welfare. They may be right, at least she seems less concerned about the welfare of women having sexual relationships with her husband.

Trump claims that he didn’t talk about Hillary’s comments because after all it was a family matter and their daughter Chelsea was in the audience. How clever….and how obvious. Trump, although he may not know it, is using paralepsis here, This is a rhetorical technique as ancient as Cicero in which you claim you won’t mention your opponent’s faults and shortcomings, although by claiming that you won’t mention them, you have mentioned them.

Reagan, claiming that he would not call attention to his opponent’s youth and inexperience when he was debating Walter Mondale used this technique. (I’d bet he didn’t know what it was called either.)

Then, off script once more Trump announced that he didn’t believe that Hillary had been faithful to Bill, “Why should she?” he asked. Marriage faithfulness isn’t a high valued ethic among some of the Top Trump supporters. Trump, Giuliani and Gingrich have been married a total of nine times. On a Sunday, “Meet the Press” Giuliani claimed that all males were unfaithful in their marriages and because he was Roman Catholic, he could confess and be forgiven. That comment got him some outraged responses.

It is amazing to see how far some Trump supporters will go to avoid being politically correct.