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Trump’s Tax Returns: Why We Will See Them, and What We Will Find

David Cay Johnston on Trump’s taxes, Zoë Carpenter on plastics, and Laurie Winer on Stephen Miller.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

April 18, 2019

President Donald Trump during a visit to Florida International University in Miami, Florida, on February 18, 2019. (Reuters / Kevin Lamarque)

The chair of the House Ways and Means Committee formally requested six years of Trump’s personal and business tax returns earlier this month. Trump has said he won’t turn them over—and that the law is “100 percent” on his side. He’s 100 percent wrong about that. David Cay Johnston explains why the IRS director is required to hand over the returns—or face five years in jail—and also what we’re likely to find in Trump’s tax returns: his tax cheating and his money laundering for Russian oligarchs. David is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter who is founder and editor of DCReport.org.

Also—plastics and pollution: The problem isn’t just all the plastic in the oceans; it’s also the manufacturing of plastics, a toxic petrochemical. The Nation’s Zoë Carpenter reports from the Texas and Louisiana gulf coasts on the current boom in the production of plastics, a consequence of fracking.

Plus: In Trump’s latest blowup over immigration, Stephen Miller has played the central role—goading him to close the border, warning him of the dangers of looking weak, and encouraging his sudden purge of his homeland security team. But who is this Stephen Miller? He grew up in liberal Santa Monica—what happened? What went wrong? Laurie Winer reports—she wrote about Stephen Miller for LA Magazine.

 

Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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