When the New York Times published its bombshell tax story claiming that President Trump only paid $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017, officials pulled out their tried-and-tested crisis management plan.
Tweets and multiple media appearances followed as part of a multipronged strategy: Claim the president merely made use of tax breaks available to all taxpayers, dismiss the reports as part of a coordinated smear timed to coincide with the first presidential debate, and portray the Trump businesses as successful and underleveraged. And then yawn.
It might be best summed up as deny, flood, and dismiss.
A former White House official said there was nothing new in the response.
“The strategy is what the strategy always is when we get bad press: Meet it head-on with a massive barrage of counterprogramming, including the fact that everyone who’s smart pays as little tax as possible,” he said.
Trump was scheduled to appear before reporters at the White House on Sunday evening just as the story dropped. The 10,000-word investigation claimed that the president paid no income tax in 10 of the previous 15 years, “largely because he reported losing much more money than he made,” in the words of the New York Times.
The result was something between a rock and a hard place. Either Trump was a loser or he should have paid more in taxes.
The first response came from the president as he took the podium in the briefing room. He wanted to talk about his nominee for the Supreme Court, unveiled the day before, but was bombarded with questions about his tax returns.
“You could have asked me the same questions four years ago,” he shot back. “I had to litigate this and talk about it. Totally fake news.”
“Old news,” might have been the better expression, reflecting not just the years of questions about Trump’s taxes and his refusal to release his returns, but the certainty among many supporters and aides that the president’s weaknesses and flaws — from fast food to women — are too well known to matter by now.
As White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told Fox News: “This is the same playbook they tried in 2016 — the same playbook that the American people rejected and will do so again.”
Erin Perrine, Trump’s 2020 director of press communications, hit the same note with the same station, saying that journalists had been asking the same questions since 2015.
“It didn’t work then, and it didn’t work now,” she said.
None of that means it cannot put a dent in Trump’s reelection chances. Voters lining up at rallies in 2015 and 2016, for example, frequently cited business acumen as part of his appeal as a candidate.
And a 2016 Gallup poll found it was key to his success in winning the Republican nomination. Some 16% of Republicans said his skills as a businessman were crucial to their support — second only to his status a political outsider.
Some of the new details are embarrassing to be sure — $70,000 on hair-care expenses? But if there is lasting damage, it would be in undermining Trump’s image as a shrewd deal-maker.
The newspaper reported that the president’s hotels and golf courses had been reporting losses for years. For example, the Trump National Doral Miami has lost more than $162 million since he bought it in 2012, according to its figures.
But again, the accusations that Trump is a terrible businessman, that his companies have been through multiple bankruptcies, and that it was The Apprentice that largely helped him reinvent his public persona were staples of news coverage during the last presidential election.
“We’ve been through this in 2016, and here we are again,” a senior administration official said. “Voters have already given their verdict.”
