Following the New York Times report revealing that Donald Trump may have dodged paying taxes for almost 20 years, the Republican nominee’s surrogates insisted that the report only proves how smart Trump is.
“He’s a genius,” former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday morning.
Giuliani argued on ABC News that Trump “would have been a fool not to take advantage” of the tax code.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie also boasted that Trump is a “genius.” On Fox News, Christie said that the New York Times report highlighted “what an absolute mess the federal tax code is.”
“And that’s why Donald Trump is the person best positioned to fix it,” he said. “There’s no one who’s shown more genius in their way to maneuver about the tax code as he rightfully used the laws to do that. And he’s already promised in his tax plan to change many of these special interest loopholes and get rid of them so you don’t have this kind of situation.”
Christie spun the New York Times report on Trump’s loss of nearly a billion dollars in 1995 as a positive story.
“This is a guy who when lots of businesses went out of business in the early 1990s, he fought and clawed back to build another fortune, to create tens of thousands of more jobs. This is actually a very, very good story for Donald Trump,” he said.
Ann Coulter said that only the media cares about Trump’s tax returns.
“No one cares, except the media. There was enough on that during the debate; can we please move on to the issues? No. One. Cares,” she told The Guardian. “Good grief, this is all the media will talk about. They keep saying they want to talk policy, but every time Trump won during the debate was when they talked policy. We only have three debates and we’ve already spent the entire last year on Trump’s taxes and half the effing debate. Can we talk about policy?”
The Trump campaign also dismissed the New York Times’ reporting in a Saturday night statement, but the campaign did not deny that Trump avoided paying income taxes.
“Mr. Trump is a highly-skilled businessman who has a fiduciary responsibility to his business, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required. That being said, Mr. Trump has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes, sales and excise taxes, real estate taxes, city taxes, state taxes, employee taxes and federal taxes, along with very substantial charitable contributions,” the campaign statement reads. “Mr. Trump knows the tax code far better than anyone who has ever run for President and he is the only one that knows how to fix it.”
