Donald Trump: The release of the former US president’s tax returns after a long battle

And it is not likely, according to experts, that the publication of these declarations will affect Trump’s chances of running in the upcoming presidential elections.

Trump has long opposed publishing his tax returns, saying it would deepen the political divide in the country.

American presidents are paid as much as any public servant in the country. Although they used to publish their tax returns, there is no law requiring them to do so.

The records showed that the Federal Tax Service did not investigate Trump’s tax records during the first years of his presidency. But it started after Democrats demanded access to the commission’s records.

Since entering politics, Trump’s opponents have been keen to show the truth about his wealth.

In contrast, Trump has always courted voters on the grounds that his money has kept him immune to special interests and bribes affecting politicians.

The former president objected to the disclosure of his tax records.

The records disclosed span the period from 2015 to 2020, and thus include his presidency.

Trump warned that the disclosure of these records reinforces the state of polarization in the American political arena.

“The Democrats should not have done this, and the Supreme Court should not have decided this,” he said in a statement. “This will lead to terrible things for a lot of people.”

These are the stages that preceded the publication of the records today, Friday:

For decades, US presidential candidates and incumbents have published their tax returns in favor of transparency and accountability.

The longstanding tradition has been “basically about trying to reassure the public that the president operates free from conflict and interests, and taxes are a window into someone’s financial soul,” said Steve Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

But Trump “broke all convention,” Rosenthal said, by refusing to release his tax returns as a presidential candidate in the 2016 election.

And his insistence on not revealing it increased the fears of opponents that he might be hiding something. Some wondered: Is what he hides is that he is not as rich as he claims, or that he paid less taxes than he should?

Meanwhile, his supporters supported his right to privacy. After all, there is no legal obligation for a candidate to disclose their tax returns.

During his presidency and beyond, the public has gradually seen an aspect of Trump’s personal tax record.

Much of that comes from the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation, published by The New York Times in 2020, which obtained the records of two decades of Trump’s tax returns from the run-up to his presidency. The documents provided an unprecedented view of Trump’s finances.

Those returns revealed that he paid negligible amounts in federal income taxes during that period, and that he reported on his tax returns that his businesses lost large sums of money—despite his public boasts of his financial successes.

In 2017, the newspaper reported that Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes despite being a billionaire.

Rosenthal said that what was published by the New York Times “calls into question whether he is a billionaire, or is there some trick he uses to avoid paying taxes, legally or not.”

Meanwhile, Democrats in Washington have begun to use their powers to censor Trump should they gain a majority in the House of Representatives in early 2019.

For three years, a House committee has sought access to Trump’s tax returns.

The battle moved up to the US Supreme Court this year. In November, judges refused to withhold tax returns from the committee, allowing them to be published.

On December 21, the committee voted to make the tax returns it obtained publicly available, splitting the vote between the two parties.

The publication of the tax documents on Friday comes just days before the Republicans are scheduled to take control of the House of Representatives, which indicates the possibility of stopping any prosecution of Trump’s financial records in the near future.

But the Senate, which is controlled by Democrats, may continue these investigations.