Thank you Rachel Maddow for proving to your #Trump hating followers how successful @realDonaldTrump is & that he paid $40mm in taxes! #TaxesTrue enough, President Trump's taxes have been under scrutiny, with suspicions being raised that he pays no taxes at all because of a huge write-off from a decade ago, and people have suggested that he might no longer be wealthy, but "in the red", his total debt being larger than his assets. It has also been suggested that his business is no longer turning a profit, which puts him at risk of bankruptcy. However, the 2005 tax return doesn't prove nor disprove any of that. What his finances looked like 12 years ago really has nothing to do with what they look like today. For all we know, he could now be losing money at an alarming rate and be bankrupt. If that is the case, a suitable diversion would be to release some partial income and tax information from back when he still turned a profit and paid taxes, and pretend that it came from some mysterious, malicious source rather than from Donald Trump himself.
2005, a few years before his financial troubles allegedly started in 2008, was most likely a particularly good year for Trump. The source behind the leak seems to have cherry-picked this year and released only the unspecific summary part of the tax return. It's actually pretty likely that this is a "fake leak" from Donald Trump himself or one of his close associates. After a few days, he can say "Was this your best shot? Pathetic! (Sad.)", or something to that effect, and hope for the public interest in his tax returns to fade away. I don't think it's going to work, but it's not an entirely bad move. Not very well executed, true, but not completely stupid either.
It was a bit surprising to see Rachel Maddow jump on this, because she and her team seem smarter than that. Perhaps she deliberately took the bait to see what would happen? The response from the White House made an unfounded accusation of her breaking the law. That might not be enough to constitute a formal abuse of authority or intimidation, but at the very least it makes them look bad. Seeing how unusually coordinated and swift their follow-up has been so far is also suspicious, and interesting. She might just be stringing them along to see where it leads, and then drop the bomb about this being a fake leak. The Trump administration has a history of messing up its information management plans rather badly.
In any case, this is probably not the end of this story. If Donald Trump is prepared to put his entire presidency at risk rather than release his recent tax returns, they must surely contain some very juicy secrets. Things like that make people very curious indeed.
