After the longest bout of foreplay ever, the Democrats have coughed up Trump’s tax records.

As an aside, we should talk sometime about the precedent of doing this, but for now, let’s see what we see.

You can tell a lot by how disappointed the Democrats are in it that they dumped it on a Tuesday night, and that they are cloaking it in terms of needing some weird new oversight legislation of “every president’s finances”. I happen to be keenly interested in the current big guy’s, if anyone’s asking.

Anyhow, the accusations and insinuations were always kind of nonsensical. As Tweeted by CNN business, here’s the biggie:

Trump paid no federal income tax in his last year as president.

He had paid $1.1M the previous two years, also as president.

Which I guess means he lost money while serving as president. I wonder when that last happened with any of our recent presidents?

Nothing here about Russian collusion, or obvious fraud. Look, you can argue (and I certainly do) about the current tax system. Yes, it sucks. Yes, it is gamed by the wealthiest people, be they red or blue, incidentally.

But we were promised that “the walls were closing in” and there’s nothing so far to suggest it.

It makes you wonder if they could’ve had Trump’s returns long ago, and if he withheld them just to yank their chains.

Once they made it a moral campaign, he got stubborn. Would you expect anything else from him? Donald Trump used the tax code the way rich businessmen do, and we know this because he has bragged about doing so. Repeatedly.

Back to the precedent. How many times in the last few years has something completely out of bounds and norms been sold to us as a “just this once” special occasion?

There was no legitimate law enforcement or legislative reason for doing it this time.

Next time, with the next politician, candidate or public figure, they’ll just say, “well, we did it before”.

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