Trump for the working class..

[Martin K]

And, as people suggested, he could have made his returns public:

1. To prove the NYT wrong
   
2. To show that he is "brilliant" at paying the least amount of taxes, as he claims.
   

Since he has still not made his tax returns public, we must assume the NYT is right and there is likely something even worse in the returns. What, well perhaps this:

Trump has refused to publicly release his tax returns, a simple transparency measure adopted by candidates in both parties to demonstrate the integrity of their personal finances. The tax documents published by the Times make clear once again that Trump’s public presentation and real life diverge remarkably. At the time of this tax return, after all, Trump was promoting a career renaissance, not a near-billion-dollar loss. “He has reduced his personal debt—loans guaranteed with his own signature—from $975 million to $115 million,” Trump biographer Ed Klein told Newsday the year before.

In 1995, he negotiated a deal to offload his failing investment in the Plaza Hotel to a Saudi prince that included the cancellation of $125 million in debt. He sold his failing casinos to the public that summer, so he was no longer responsible for their debt, and used some of the money he raised to pay down nearly $36 million in additional personal debt. He also received a $1 million salary and a $3 million loan from the new public corporation. (The company would eventually declare bankruptcy in 2004, and again in 2009.)

All that, including debt forgiven, should be treated as income in the US tax system, with Trump on the hook for the appropriate tax payments. But it appears that whatever income he received was eclipsed by his losses, at least some of which appear to have been carried forward from previous years, suggesting the magnitude is far larger than the net figure of $916 million.

Donald Trump's leaked 1995 tax return raises these big, unanswered questions — Quartz