Trump’s tax returns spark avalanche of memes, jokes

Twitter users are having fun at the expense of both sides of the aisle after Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee released Donald Trump‘s tax returns.

After a six-year fight, reams of the former president’s confidential tax information hit the internet Friday morning in a move some believed would shine a light on how Trump might have benefitted from policies he’d championed from the Oval Office, or may have avoided paying millions in taxes.

Others saw the release as a precedent-setting invasion of privacy for a man who became the first president to not voluntarily release their tax returns in decades, establishing a setting in which Congress could compel the release of any private citizens’ tax information for political purposes.

But many saw the release for how the public might perceive them: a mountain of nothing, that would do little to alter public opinion.

“Since Donald Trump spent so many years and paid for so many lawyers’ billable hours to keep his tax returns locked up, how could I not spend so much less of my own time to download the 1.19 GB Attachment E .zip archive of redacted copies of his returns?” writer Rob Pegoraro wrote on Twitter.

“The biggest revelation this morning is that for 6 years in a row Trump did his own taxes using TurboTax but always turned down purchasing Turbo Tax Audit Defense™️,” joked Todd Berger, a film writer and director.

Others noted that much of the content of Trump’s tax returns was already widely known. While reporting by outlets like The New York Times revealed a long history of tax avoidance dating to the 1980s, Trump and his associates largely began cleaning up his business dealings as he began running for president in 2015.

However, the returns did confirm suspicions of millions of dollars of holdings overseas, as well as sizable amounts of interest paid on loans to his children that some suspected were efforts to shield large sums of money he was gifted.

But the returns also helped to underscore one of the main takeaways from the House Ways and Means Committee’s investigation into Trump’s taxes: that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) failed to conduct mandatory regular audits of Trump’s finances under Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin‘s leadership until 2019, after Chairman Richard Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat, sent a letter asking the IRS for Trump’s returns and tax information.

“Donald Trump didn’t pay taxes in 2017 or 2020, but I bet everybody who voted for him did #TrumpTaxReturns,” tweeted Tara Dublin, a liberal blogger.

Still, their release is marred by controversy, particularly after some Republicans on the committee objected to what they called political motivations attached to their release. According to Ways and Means Republicans, their objections were never published, while Democratic deliberations behind their rationale to produce the returns were.

“With the publicly released transcript of Democrats’ secret executive session, Americans now have confirmation that there was never a legislative purpose behind the public release of these confidential records and that the IRS was conducting audits prior to Democrats’ request,” they wrote in a statement.