Crooked Media - What A Day: Don of the debt

President Trump’s elusive financial records have finally emerged, and, what do you know, they paint a clear picture of someone who absolutely should not be president. 
 

• A bombshell New York Times report found that Donald Trump paid just $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017, and paid no federal income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years. He pulled that off by reporting staggering business losses, leading to the inevitable conclusion that Trump has either a) lied to voters about being good at business, b) lied on his tax forms, or c) lied about everything, at all times, to everyone, while stealing from lower-income taxpayers to prop up his own businesses. A real head-scratcher!
   
• The tax returns expose not only Trump’s failures as a businessman, but his vulnerability to pressure from authoritarian regimes. During his first two years in office, Trump’s revenue from abroad totaled $73 million—including revenue from licensing deals in geopolitically sensitive countries like India, Turkey, and the Philippines. (In a damning reflection of our broken tax system, Trump paid substantial taxes in those countries while stiffing the U.S. government.) Trump’s records also show that he raked in $2.3 million from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, courtesy of a family with close ties to Vladimir Putin.
   
• Then there’s your standard tax-code abuse: In some cases, Trump seems to have evaded paying taxes by improperly writing off payouts to his own family. Between 2010 and 2018, Trump wrote off $28 million in vague “consulting fees.” Some of those fees exactly match consultant payments Ivanka Trump received on hotel deals she also managed directly in her role at the family company. Trump also wrote off more than $70,000 for hair styling as a business expense during The Apprentice era, and still looks like that somehow. Anyhow, AOC would like a word. 

The biggest takeaway is that Trump isn’t just less wealthy than he claims—he is up to his $70,000 haircut in debt, which makes his presidency a serious national-security threat.
 

• Trump has been fighting the IRS over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million income-tax refund he claimed and received in 2010; if he loses, he could be forced to pay back over $100 million. He’s already personally responsible for loans and debts totaling at least $421 million, with most of it coming due in the next four years. That kind of debt would rightly preclude most people from receiving security clearance. If re-elected, what’s to stop Trump from making national policy decisions based on what his (unknown, potentially foreign) lenders demand?
   
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi highlighted that concern in her response to the report today: “He has exposure to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, to whom? The public has a right to know.” The Biden campaign focused on that viscerally offensive $750 number, comparing Trump’s meager tax payments to the typical income taxes of ordinary American workers in a swiftly-produced new ad. (Trump’s response has been to call the report “fake news,” while also falsely accusing the Times of illegally obtaining his tax information. Seamless.)

Donald Trump ran for president in 2016 to boost his flagging marketability, has used the office to support his failing businesses, and is now prepared to steal an election to avoid accountability for the mountain of debt he can’t afford to pay. Trump was terrified of voters finding out that he is, above all, pathetic. We can work with that. 

You’ve all been making calls and texts and working your asses off to win this election, and Crooked wanted to make something fun to commemorate the work you’ve done in this moment. Check out our brand new Vote Save America Action Calendar! It’s like an advent calendar, but for the election, and instead of chocolate, there are stickers.  As always, a portion of every order in the Crooked store goes to VoteRiders. Get yours now at crooked.com/store→ 

The Trump administration has spent more than $300 million on an ad blitz to “defeat despair” about the coronavirus ahead of the election. The campaign will reportedly feature administration officials and celebrities (well, Dennis Quaid) discussing the pandemic and the administration’s response. It was organized by former Health and Human Services spokesman Michael Caputo, who’s now on medical leave, and who claimed in a Facebook video that the campaign was “demanded of me by the president of the United States. Personally.” Caputo’s team abruptly commandeered $300 million that Congress had appropriated for the CDC—literally weakening the pandemic response to pay for campaign ads falsely assuring voters that the response is going great. House Democrats have launched an investigation, but haven’t yet been able to halt the contract.

• President Trump formally nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court on Saturday, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham has set a timeline to have the committee approve her on October 22. Several Senate Democrats have pledged not to meet with Barrett, and several Republicans have absurdly/falsely/slanderously accused them of hating Catholics. 
   
• The first presidential debate will take place in Cleveland, OH, on Tuesday night, sans any fact-checking from moderator Chris Wallace. Joe Biden has been preparing so diligently that journalists are whining that he won’t talk to them, while Trump has been golfing, refusing to practice, and demanding that Biden pee in a cup. Elon Musk’s vote naturally hangs in the balance. 
   
• Former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale was hospitalized after his wife called 911 to report that he was armed and threatening suicide. Parscale was in the house with ten guns when police arrived, and his wife told officers that he had hit her days earlier, according to the police report. 
   
• Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has announced October 5 as the “target date” for ending the Census count, in spite of a court order to continue counting efforts through the end of October. Keep that law and order comin’! 
   
• After the Trump campaign cited nine discarded ballots in Pennsylvania to baselessly accuse Democrats of trying to steal the election, GOP leaders of the Pennsylvania legislature have petitioned the Supreme Court to please overturn a state supreme court ruling requiring that absentee ballots be counted after November 3.
   
• CDC Director Robert Redfield was overheard on a phone call expressing concern about Trump’s favorite coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas: "Everything he says is false.” We would politely implore Dr. Redfield to say it to America’s face.
   
• A major hospital chain was hit with a cyberattack over the weekend, forcing some hospitals to resort to working with pen and paper. It was potentially the largest medical ransomware attack in U.S. history.
   
• The Rock has endorsed Joe Biden for president, in his first-ever public presidential endorsement. The Rock has also founded Vote Save America, according to his Instagram bio, a claim that you will not hear anyone at this company deny. 

Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign targeted a list of millions of Black voters as part of an extensive effort to deter them from voting, according to a data leak obtained by the British news network Channel 4. A database used by Trump’s digital campaign team separated files on nearly 200 million American voters into eight categories. One category, “Deterrence,” was assigned to 3.5 million Black voters; Black Americans were disproportionately marked “Deterrence” in key swing states, and people of color made up 54 percent of that category overall. Combine that racially targeted deterrence with the fact that the Trump campaign and the RNC have been building a vast election-disputing legal team for the past year, and you’ve got a pretty good picture of how hard Republicans are working to convince Democratic voters that their votes don’t matter. Because, of course, they do.

Innocent people murdered at the hands of police. A broken unemployment system in Florida. Crowded elections in Wisconsin during a global pandemic. Rampant political corruption in the state of Georgia.

None of these things had to happen. A new podcast, Made to Fail, connects the dots between these government failures and pulls back the curtain on the conservative policies that time and time again have failed millions of people across the country.

In the end, these government failures weren’t by accident. They were by design.

Get the full story. Download Made to Fail today wherever you get your podcasts.

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A Georgia judge has dismissed a lawsuit seeking to purge 14,000 voters from the rolls in Fulton County.

Your donations have allowed South Carolina Democratic Senate candidate Jaime Harrison to add nearly $16 million to his TV ad spending—more than Lindsey Graham spent on his whole 2014 re-election campaign.

Maryland will become the first state to ban foam takeout containers. 

These photos of therapy dogs at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC, are nothing if not, well, therapeutic.