2020 race: Why tax revelations won’t hurt Trump with his rusted-on supporter base

President Donald Trump gestures to loud fans as he speaks at a rally at Harrisburg International Airport on September 26 in Pennsylvania. Picture: Spencer Platt/Getty Images/AFP

Accusations of a “tax bombshell” can be highly potent in an election campaign because they usually go directly to what voters care about: their pockets.

Will explosive claims about President Trump’s career of tax avoidance have the same impact?

During the 2016 campaign he did not suffer at the ballot box despite failing to follow every presidential candidate since Gerald Ford in publishing his tax returns. His numbers were “under audit”, he claimed, and the details of his tax affairs in The New York Times suggest why: he has been battling the Internal Revenue Service for years to retain a dollars 72.9 million refund, while apparently paying precious little.

Two factors will decide whether this is a tipping point that finally breaks through and erodes some of the support he has had from his rock-solid base for four years.

How will the hear?

First: how will they hear about it? This is the kind of moment that Mr Trump has spent years preparing his base for; a huge negative story broken by the liberal media that he has harangued as “fake news” and the “enemy of the people”.

His lengthy campaign to condition his supporters to reject anything detrimental printed in the mainstream media enabled him to deflect recent disclosures based on anonymous sources in The Atlantic magazine that he insulted fallen American soldiers as “losers” and “suckers”.

Conservative US media played down the tax issue on Monday and prepared for the first presidential debate with headlines from a report by Republican senators about money allegedly sent to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, from the wife of a former mayor of Moscow.

If they hear, will they care?

Second: do they care? There is an argument that Mr Trump’s wheeler-dealing is already baked in and that his supporters not only accept his tax chicanery, they admire it. This was, after all, a big part of the first presidential debate in 2016, when Hillary Clinton accused Mr Trump of not paying federal taxes and he retorted: “That makes me smart.”

People jeer at the media as President Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Pennsylvania. Picture: Spencer Platt/Getty Images/AFP

The New York Times plans to drip out more of Mr Trump’s tax details during the closing weeks of the election campaign. The Democrats will do all they can to ensure that everyone hears about the mere $US750 he is said to have paid in personal tax, and it may have some impact, especially if the economy does not make the “super V-shaped recovery” the president is touting.

Mr Trump created a huge problem for himself in not publishing his taxes on his own terms: he is left trying to brand The New York Times version as “fake news” while also claiming that these fake details were “illegally obtained” and that he was “entitled to depreciation and tax credits”. He wants Americans to dismiss the revelations but at the same time he wants to explain them.

In a divided country where much of the media has long since taken sides, many of his supporters are likely to see this as simply election mudslinging by the opposition.

The Times