For several years now, Democrats have promised to get a hold of President Trump’s tax returns and reveal them to the public, as if that would change how people feel about him. Well, on the last business day of 2022, they finally did, and it was like a firework dud that never went off. You know, you get one of those fancy fireworks for the Fourth of July and hype up as a great climax to a backyard firework display. Then once you light the fuse, it just never goes off. That is what happened with the tax return issue, with Democrats releasing them with great fanfare thinking that something would happen that never did. As it turned out, Trump paid the taxes he owed, and primarily through his political years, he lost many millions of dollars of losses, which allowed him to take deductions, which he deserved. With all the hype, there was no smoking gun, nothing that showed wrongdoing. The only thing that was revealed with the insanity of liberal views on tax policy, income, and the merit of wealth, was how bad the progressive policy is for American sentiment. The assumption is that everyone in society has a “fair share” that they owe to a government that is obviously out of touch and wastes too much money. Their assumption, reflected in all “progressive tax policy” since 1913, has been that the more you have, the more you owe as if the government made it so that you could have that money. That’s the attitude. They are like mobsters who want their cut for not destroying your life.
The truth about the Trump taxes, which says a lot about him, is that he spent many years of his life building up a reasonable amount of wealth the traditional way. He’s not like these mindless tech billionaires who made a lot of money riding the wave of a new technology. Trump, the way he was in the 80s and 90s, would have had to make hundreds of billions of dollars to compete. But in those days, becoming a billionaire was a lot harder than today, so he was in unique territory. Trump was considered one of the wealthiest men in the world during those years when he had The Apprentice television show on NBC. I’ve said it for a long time when Trump met Melania, and it took a couple of things for him; he needed to get older and less interested in parading women around to show how powerful he was because that used to be a thing in the 90s. And Trump has changed while married to Melania, the supermodel wife who has obviously been very smart. I’ve met her, and I think a lot of her. She’s a sharp personality and clearly has the attention of Trump, who goes out of his way to ensure she’s happy. I don’t think Donald Trump would have ever run and won the presidency without Melania Trump. He might have talked about it as he did back in the Reform Party days, which I remember well. I was involved in the Reform Party during the Ross Perot days, so I remember precisely what was going on and why. The values for Trump changed; he was no longer concerned about making the most money in the world, but about using the money he had made to leave something behind that people would remember forever, something better than any building, any hot supermodel wife, or even a really great family. He wanted to save the country from the obvious intrusions against it that he became aware of. It looks like 9/11 was a big deal for him that changed him as a person, along with that television show, and slowly in the decade that followed, as his relationship with Melania grew, his focus changed a lot.
That bit of backstory is significant because Trump became President without thinking of making money for the first time in his life. The combination of being married to Melania Trump, becoming the head of the Republican Party, and actually living in the White House for the first time made him a better person. I always liked Trump as a business guy, but I never liked his failed relationships with women. That was what kept me from supporting him during the Reform Party period. But like everything they do, liberals have been targeting wealthy people for years with their Karl Marx hatred of all management positions. By the time Trump ran for President, they had assumed among themselves that they had destroyed such notions among the wealthy that they had an obligation toward altruism and not the opulent showing off of that wealth. The value was in how much you could make, then give away to the needy. By the time this assumption had taken hold during the Bush administration and the first administration of Obama, the open socialist, the stage was set for Trump. Many of us from the Reform Party migrated into the Tea Party movement to protect America from the erosion of wealth that was obviously occurring as a perception of anti-America sentiment, which was always a full-scale assault on wealth creation and the nature of America in the first place. Then the Tea Party became the MAGA movement, led by Trump, bringing us to our current period.
By looking at Trump’s tax returns, it’s evident that the plan for his companies was to take a long view and to become President, give back his salary, take his losses and claim those losses in filing with the IRS to stop as much bleeding as possible. But to be in the hot seat as President with all the investigations and harassment that came with it, Trump was prepared to lose a lot of money. But it wasn’t the kind of loss that the political left had set the stage for. It was more of an Atlas Shrugged activity where Trump denied his wealthy input into the world of politics through donations and instead took up the job himself to show how easily it could all be done. Which considering the opposition, which was literally everyone in the establishment from the top down, Trump was enormously successful. His value was in actual production instead of some mindless commitment to a “fair share,” as defined by the same looting government that wanted to steal the money from all his hard work and then distribute it among themselves for the growth of more big government. I always thought it took a lot of guts for Trump to change his lifestyle, and it really took a lot for Melania to go through it with him. She could have chosen many things to do in her life as one of the most beautiful women in the world. But she has stuck with Trump, she has committed herself as a mom to her son, and she is deeply committed to the American experience, far more than many people realize. And she has Donald Trump’s heart enough to convince him to take these massive losses revealed in the tax returns to save his country from the terrors of liberalism. And that was a story that the political left didn’t want to see. But ultimately, that was shown to the world by revealing those returns, which is why nobody is discussing the story, because it didn’t do what Democrats want. Instead, it further validated Trump’s position and articulated quite well why he’s the perfect person for the job of President even more.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 