I gotta say, I didn’t think Rachel Maddow would hand President Trump his biggest win this week.
It looked like a relatively slow news night, with most pundits focused on the ongoing healthcare debate or the upcoming budget talks Then out of nowhere, like a liberal Lady Godiva, Maddow unleashed the following tweet:
Twitter went crazy, conspiracies began flying. Could we finally be getting some answers about whether Trump is really the Manchurian Candidate engineered in Vladimir Putin’s laboratory? Maybe he’s not that rich after all—maybe he’s only worth a few hundred million dollars! Oh, I bet he didn’t pay any taxes, that’s what he was hiding, right?
At 9 p.m. sharp, I turned on Maddow’s show for the first time since I was a confused teenager, eagerly awaiting the liberal pundit to break the biggest news story of the year.
And then I kept waiting.
And waiting.
Did Maddow actually have Trump’s tax returns? For the first 15 minutes of the show, she fell back into campaign mode, acting indignant that Trump refused to release the returns himself. She brought up tenuous Russian connections that so many voters heard throughout the campaign and chose to ignore. These tax returns, Maddow promised, could possibly shed light on all of these accusations.
Except they didn’t.
Maddow waited so long that the White House scooped her an hour in advance, and the Daily Beast released the returns in the middle of one of her rants. But that didn’t matter, she still had the audience. Then, finally, some details came out.
She only had two pages of a 2005 tax return. Okay, better than nothing. What did they show?
Well, things that will probably only help the president’s image. (Who knows: Trump himself may have even leaked the two pages from the return.) According to the documents, Trump paid $38 million in federal income taxes after making $153 million that year, an effective tax rate of 24 percent.
So he did pay taxes after all. In fact, Trump paid a higher income tax rate in 2005 than Mitt Romney did in 2011 (11 percent), Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2014 (13.5 percent), and President Obama in 2015 (19.6 percent).
I wonder what Maddow’s tax rate is. (Some of her colleagues, by the way, aren’t exactly role models when it comes to paying your taxes on time.)
Sure, returns from others years could contain something more nefarious—after all, the Maddow scoop consisted of two pages from an 12-year-old tax return. But forgive me for not just trusting all the people who simply assume that Trump is hiding something explosive.
None of this stopped Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnson (who actually got the returns first) from appearing on the show and immediately pivoting into why these returns are evidence of an unfair system with rates too low for the wealthy. Suddenly, the case for Trump as a Russian agent just got a lot weaker. It’s funny: Steve Bannon has declared the press “the opposition party,” but they might be Trump’s biggest asset.
Johnson tried helping recover from the lack of a smoking gun by saying: “Most importantly, what we don’t have here, which is, this describes the types of income, but not the sources. That’s what we need to know. Who is the president getting money from?” He later said, “There must be something hiding in his returns.”
But Johnson’s only evidence for that is the fact that Trump doesn’t want to hand his personal financial records over so people like him can create some kind of John le Carré-esque fantasy to smear the guy.
Yes, Trump should release all his tax returns, and the fact that he hasn’t remains relatively scandalous. But performances like these from the Fourth Estate only diminish any remaining trust from the public. If anything, Trump just got even more of an incentive to remain secretive. At this point, who could blame him?