Rudy Giuliani went on ABC’s This Week and added to the woes of the Trump campaign with a series of gibberish filled lies that were intended to make Trump look smart by stiffing the American people of out paying his fair share of income taxes for decades, but instead showed why Trump is unelectable.
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Transcript via ABC’s This Week:
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STEPHANOPOULOS: Here’s what Robby Mook from the Clinton campaign says. It says — he says “it reveals the colossal nature of Donald Trump’s past business failures. He apparently got to avoid paying taxes for nearly two decades while tens of millions of working families paid theirs.”
GIULIANI: OK, well, first of all that’s not clear that it’s a — in other words, what was the loss, 1.8 billion?
STEPHANOPOULOS: $916 million.
GIULIANI: $916 million, well, last year for example he made $625 million. So if he had one year in which he made $1 billion, he would’ve wiped out the loss carried over in one year. So it’s unlikely that he carried forward for 18 years. That’s the amount income he was making.
Second, every great man has had failures. In “The Art of the Deal” he explains that. Churchill was thrown out of office twice. Steve Jobs was fired from Apple and had nothing. The reality is this man, 26 years ago, had some failures, and then he built an empire. I like that working for me, for the United States.
STEPHANOPOULOS: How come —
GIULIANI: He’s a genius at how to take advantage of legal remedies that can help your company survive and grow.
….
STEPHANOPOULOS: The statement from the Trump campaign doesn’t say that he paid federal income taxes over those 18 years. Did he?
GIULIANI: I haven’t seen his tax — I’m not his lawyer. I haven’t seen his tax returns. I would suspect that he did because that kind of loss that you’re looking at, given the income that I saw in his financial disclosure form, would say to me that he probably paid off that carry forward very, very quickly.
Look, I have clients with carry forwards are twice that, three times that. This is part of what you’re doing business. If you — and if you didn’t do it, you would be sued.
Everything Rudy Giuliani said on ABC’s This Week was a lie because he mixed up business income with personal income. Trump’s businesses are separate corporations, which pay separate taxes. It doesn’t matter how much money the businesses made. What matters is how much income Trump personally took in, and whether not he personally paid taxes on that income.
Trump’s personal tax returns have nothing to do with the fiduciary responsibility. It is all about how big of a piece of the pie Trump gave himself and the steps he took to avoid paying taxes.
The lie that somehow cheating the income tax system for self-benefit makes Donald Trump a genius will only make the tax returns problem worse. Instead of explaining that this is exactly what’s wrong with the current tax system and why it needs to change, Donald Trump has ordered his campaign to turn his selfish behavior into a statement of personal genius.
The way the Trump campaign is handling the tax returns story makes it certain that it is not going to go away.
It’s about to get a lot rougher on the campaign trail for Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
