2017 Mar 15^th

Here it is, the Ides of March, and no seer has told us that Trump could be in trouble, but Trump is in trouble. (Seers just aren’t what they used to be.) Rachel Madow, liberal muckraker-in-chief has revealed two pages of Trump’s tax returns from 2005, a dozen years ago. They were sent unrequested to David Kay Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter. (Fox News had to point out that five years ago Johnson published an article falsely accusing Fox’s parent company of paying lower taxes than they should have paid. Johnson quickly withdrew that article and apologized to Murdoch. So what?) Trump junior went on a rant about the “stolen” tax returns and the use of criminal means to boost ratings; all of which were lies. Many pundits believe this two-page, carefully selected return, was deliberately leaked by Trump himself.

First, why leak a portion of a return from 2005? That was a year when he made money and paid taxes. In fact, the “Alternative Minimum Tax” (AMT) which keeps the super-rich from running up enough deductions to insure a very low tax rate caught him and he paid over 38 million in taxes. He wants to do away with the AMT; without AMT Trump would have paid just 5.3 million on his over 150 million of income. Most of Trump’s tax policies have Trump, his family and his wealthy supporters as the major beneficiaries.

Second, Trump’s accusation of Obama’s ‘wiretapping’ his phones in Trump Tower is getting ever closer to requiring some proof. Both Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer have explained that President Trump put the word wiretapped in quotes and that meant that he really didn’t mean wiretapped. Perhaps this is another alt-fact, or maybe one of those occasions where Trump is not to be taken literally just so long as we know what is in his heart. One right wing propagandist jumps up to claim that we shouldn’t take Trump literally as long as we take him seriously. This utterly asinine apologia for Trump’s erratic remarks needs no comment. Will two pages from a 12 year old tax return call off those who believe Trump has lied about President Obama? Don’t bet on it.

There are other issues that just surfaced today and couldn’t have influenced the sudden appearance of two pages of Trump’s 2005 tax returns. We have the feds catching the Russian spies who hired hackers who broke into the Yahoo accounts stealing thousands of records. The government has their names and one of them, in Canada, has already been arrested. The thieves were being funded by the Russian FSB, a security service. This makes the Trump-Putin connection still more delicate and perhaps not recoverable. Even Trump’s closest buddies will soon decide his Russian friends will be dangerous to their re-election chances.

The most recent Trump trouble came just tonight when it was announced that his brand new revised and improved travel ban has been delayed of implementation by a Hawaiian judge.  The rationale is still based on the ban’s discrimination against Muslims. This will probably be reversed by SCOTUS but in the meantime poor old Donald is surely taking a beating.

When do you suppose it will dawn on him that he could be spending his twilight years playing golf and admiring his trophies.