Trump’s tax returns spark an avalanche of memes and jokes

Twitter users are having fun at the expense of both sides of the aisle after Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee released Donald Trump’s tax returns.

After a six-year fight, reams of the former president’s confidential tax information were leaked onto the internet Friday morning in a move some thought would shed light on how Trump could have benefited from the policies he had championed since the oval office, or could have avoided paying millions in taxes.

Others saw the release as an unprecedented invasion of privacy for a man who became the first president to voluntarily not release his tax returns in decades, establishing a framework within which Congress could compel the release of tax returns. tax information of any private citizen for political purposes. .

But many saw the release of how the public might perceive them: a mountain of nothing, which would do little to alter public opinion.

“Since Donald Trump has spent so many years and paid so many billable lawyer hours to keep his tax returns under lock and key, how could I not spend far less of my time downloading the .zip archive of 1 .19 GB Attachment E .zip redacted copies of his returns?” writer Rob Pegoraro wrote on Twitter.

“The biggest reveal this morning is that for 6 years in a row, Trump did his own taxes using TurboTax, but always refused to buy Turbo Tax Audit Defense™️,” joked Todd Berger, writer and director.

Others noted that much of the content of Trump’s tax returns was already widely known. While reporting through outlets like The New York Times revealed a long history of tax evasion dating back to the 1980s, Trump and his associates largely began cleaning up his business dealings when he began running for president in 2015.

However, the returns confirmed suspicions of millions of dollars in overseas assets, as well as significant interest paid on loans to his children which some suspected were efforts to protect large sums of money that he had. had been given.

But the returns also helped underscore one of the key lessons of the House Ways and Means Committee’s investigation into Trump’s taxes: that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) did not conduct mandatory regular audits of Trump’s finances under Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin until 2019, after President Richard Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat, sent a letter asking the IRS for Trump’s tax returns and information.

“Donald Trump didn’t pay taxes in 2017 or 2020 but I bet everyone who voted for him did #TrumpTaxReturns,” tweeted liberal blogger Tara Dublin.

Still, their release is marred by controversy, particularly after some Republicans on the committee objected to what they called political motivations attached to their release. According to the Ways and Means Republicans, their objections were never published, while the Democratic deliberations behind their rationale for producing the returns were.

“With the public transcript of the Democrats’ secret executive session, Americans now have confirmation that there was never any legislative purpose behind the release of these confidential documents and that the IRS was conducting audits prior to the request. Democrats,” they wrote in a statement.