On Monday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin denied a request from the House Ways and Means Committee to access six years of President Trump’s tax returns. The denial will now likely be challenged in court. With Mnuchin’s claim that the request “lacks a legitimate legislative purpose,” President Trump’s favorite story of his own victimhood has added its latest chapter.
Since winning the White House, Trump has repeatedly cast himself as a victim. The enemies range from the liberal establishment to the deep state to the old favorite of news outlets branded “fake news.” And, like clockwork, every time some eyebrow-raising shred of information comes out about him or his administration, the response is never to rebut the alleged facts but to latch on to a narrative of being attacked.
That trick of talking past troublesome assertions and instead crafting a fanciful story of unprecedented persecution — President Clinton, for example, might have plenty to say about be subjected to the spectacle of impeachment and an endless parade of inquiry and denouncements — has worked quite well for Trump.
Even with special counsel Robert Mueller’s report detailing Russian election interference and outlining a case on obstruction of justice, Trump managed make the narrative work.
By the time the 400-plus page report was released, Attorney General William Barr had done some of Trump’s spinning for him, cherry picking sentences and casting Trump’s actions in a far more favorable light than Mueller’s findings support.
Trump’s strategy — of refusing to comment on the detailed evidence that he obstructed the investigation (criminally or not) and to focus instead on his critics — has been largely successful. At least among his supporters in the public and in Congress, the notion persists that attacks on Trump are the most important story — never mind what was actually in the document.
With the tax returns, Trump seems to be banking on pulling a similar stunt: delay the release as long as possible and, in the meantime, clearly make the public case that what really matters is not what is in those documents but instead how they were unfairly targeted.
[Read more: Chasing Trump’s tax returns]
“This is not Congressional Oversight, this is bullying.” Jason Riley, The Wall Street Journal
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 5, 2019
Even Trump knows that the law is not on the side of preventing congressional oversight. As a result, he thinks that his best bet isn’t to refute whatever is in those tax returns he has worked so hard to hide but to make sure that if (and more likely when) they come out, what people focus on is talk of an unfair process, not whatever information they contain.
