Trump got too much headache with all these requirements and obligations. He fed up with, so he'll drop out - happened in 2011.
Updated, 11:34 a.m. | Donald J. Trump said Friday that he doesn’t believe voters have a right to see his tax returns, and insisted it’s “none of your business” when pressed on what tax rate he himself pays — a question that tripped up Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race.
Mr. Trump has given different explanations for why he wouldn’t release his taxes over the years. In 2011, when he contemplated running for president, Mr. Trump said he would release his tax returns when President Obama released his birth certificate. Mr. Obama made the birth certificate public in April 2011, and Mr. Trump announced a few weeks later that he would not run for president.
Donald J. Trump waved from an alley behind Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, where he met with congressional leaders on Thursday.Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Updated, 11:34 a.m. | Donald J. Trump said Friday that he doesn’t believe voters have a right to see his tax returns, and insisted it’s “none of your business” when pressed on what tax rate he himself pays — a question that tripped up Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race.
Mr. Trump made the comments in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” as he continued to try to answer questions about his change in explanations over the last year about why he won’t release the taxes.
When the interviewer, George Stephanopoulos, asked Mr. Trump directly if he thought voters had a right to see his returns, something that presidential nominees have provided for roughly 40 years, the candidate replied, “I don’t think they do.”
Mr. Trump added: “But I do say this, I will really gladly give them — not going to learn anything but it’s under routine audit. When the audit ends I’ll present them. That should be before the election. I hope it’s before the election.”
When asked what effective tax rate he pays, Mr. Trump said: “It’s none of your business. You’ll see it when I release, but I fight very hard to pay as little tax as possible.”
Mr. Romney, who is also a businessman, delayed releasing many of his returns until September 2012, at which point they showed an effective tax rate that was much lower than most Americans pay. Mr. Trump has said in the last few years that Mr. Romney erred in waiting so long and should have done it sooner.
Also during the interview, Mr. Stephanopoulos pointed out that the Internal Revenue Service has said being audited is not prohibitive in terms of individual choice to make tax returns public, and that President Richard M. Nixon did so when he was being audited.
But he insisted that “people will learn nothing.”
“I put in financials, 100 pages worth of financials, that show that I built a company that’s worth more than $10 billion,” Mr. Trump said. “It shows cash. It shows cash flows. It shows everything. You learn very little from tax returns but nevertheless, when the audit is complete, I will release. I have no problem with it.”
He said he has no offshore accounts that would be discovered.
Mr. Trump conceded that he released tax returns under audit over a decade ago when he was seeking a casino license, but said, “At the time it didn’t make any difference to me, now it does.”
Democrats have treaded lightly on the issue of Mr. Trump’s tax returns in the last week, as Hillary Clinton faces pressure to release transcripts of her paid speeches to Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs. Mr. Trump pointed to her refusal to release the transcripts of her speeches in his interview with Mr. Stephanopoulos.
But there is no tradition for releasing transcripts of paid speeches, whereas the tradition of presidential candidates releasing tax returns stretches back decades. And Mr. Trump has faced questions repeatedly about whether he is worth what he claims to be.
“So you’ve got to ask yourself, why doesn’t he want to release them?” Mrs. Clinton said at a campaign event on Wednesday. “Yeah, well, we’re going to find out.”
She and her husband have released their taxes going back to 1977, when he first entered political life.
At minimum for Mr. Trump, the returns would help establish his level of liquidity. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee claims to have enough money to keep lending his campaign funds if he chooses to. Mr. Trump’s allies insist that comparing his taxes to Mrs. Clinton’s is unfair, since he has a private business. But he is not the first businessman ever to run for public office, and most have found ways to make their tax information available, even in redacted form.
The good government group Common Cause put out a statement calling on Mr. Trump to release the taxes, pointing out that he released under-audit versions in the early 2000s to gaming commissions in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Mr. Trump has given different explanations for why he wouldn’t release his taxes over the years. In 2011, when he contemplated running for president, Mr. Trump said he would release his tax returns when President Obama released his birth certificate. Mr. Obama made the birth certificate public in April 2011, and Mr. Trump announced a few weeks later that he would not run for president.
Last year, Mr. Trump said he was still considering whether to release the returns, but he made no mention of the audits until this year.
The I.R.S. has said when Mr. Trump first used audits as his rationale for not releasing his taxes that there was nothing in government regulations prohibiting him from doing so if he wanted to.
The Democratic National Committee released a clip of Mr. Trump discussing the release of tax returns in 2012, just before Mr. Romney released his.
“You know if you’re running at a minimum probably you’re going to have to show your returns not always,” Mr. Trump said on Fox News back then, before noting that Representative Ron Paul of Texas, who also ran in that presidential cycle, refused to release his own tax returns.
Donald J. Trump addressed the California State G.O.P. convention in Burlingame, Calif., on April 29.Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Donald J. Trump, who has admitted in the past to sometimes employing a pseudonym in which he pretended to be a spokesman for himself, insisted in an interview with NBC’s “Today” show on Friday that an audiotape from 1991 featuring a man claiming to be Mr. Trump’s spokesman was not him.
The audio of the interview with a People magazine reporter, obtained by The Washington Post, sounded similar to Mr. Trump’s cadences. At one point, Mr. Miller — who was discussing Mr. Trump’s divorce from his first wife, Ivana, in detail — used the first person when answering a question that was about the developer.
When pressed about it by Savannah Guthrie on “Today” whether it was him, Mr. Trump said: “I don’t think it, I don’t know anything about it. You’re telling me about it for the first time and it doesn’t sound like my voice at all. I have many, many people that are trying to imitate my voice and you can imagine that, and this sounds like one of these scams, one of the many scams. Doesn’t sound like me.”
Mr. Trump insisted again: “It was not me on the phone. And when was this, 25 years ago?”
Ms. Guthrie said it was that long ago, and Mr. Trump said: “Wow, you mean you’re going so low as to talk about something that took place 25 years ago about whether or not I made a phone call. I guess you’re saying under a presumed name.”
“The answer is no,” he said, “and let’s get onto more current subjects, I mean, I know it’s wonderful for your listeners but I think we have more important things to discuss.”
Mr. Trump has acknowledged in the past calling reporters under the name John Barron, a practice he described at the time as a joke gone awry.
The speaker of the House, Paul D. Ryan, at a news conference on Thursday after his meeting in Washington with Donald J. Trump.Credit Zach Gibson/The New York Times
There was harmony, if not unity, after a series of meetings on Thursday between Donald J. Trump and the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan; the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky; and other members of Congress.
Both Mr. Ryan and Mr. Trump had warm words about their meeting, though neither of them suggested that all their differences had been resolved.
The issue of conservative judges came up in the meeting. Mr. Trump said that he would soon release a list of his potential nominees for federal courts and that he had be working on it with the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, according to an attendee at the closed meeting with House members. Mr. Trump asked the members of Congress to send suggestions.
But Mr. Ryan, armed with charts to show the budget process and why he believes cuts to entitlement programs are necessary, made clear to Mr. Trump that while he respected what Mr. Trump had accomplished, there were many voters in the Republican primaries who did not vote for him. His message: Those are voters he must still appeal to.
Others also suggested to Mr. Trump that he needed to tone down his comments. And still others wanted him to back candidates down the ballot.
And so it is unclear how long this cheerful truce lasts. If it does, then Mr. Trump may have an easier time persuading his party’s “Never Trump” wing to come toward him.
John A. Boehner, the speaker of the House, in Washington last year. Mr. Boehner and his staff initiated a lawsuit to challenge the Affordable Care Act.Credit Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
The Obama administration and its allies are confident that Thursday’s federal court ruling, gutting an important part of the new health care law, will be overturned on appeal. But Republicans were not worrying about that for the moment. They were too busy celebrating the decision.
After years of complaints that the Obama White House was flagrantly exceeding its executive authority on a range of issues, a federal district court judge in Washington, Rosemary W. Collyer, agreed with Republicans on the Affordable Care Act, finding that Congress had not funded a $130 billion program providing subsides to insurance companies.
“This is a historic win for the Constitution and the American people,” Speaker Paul D. Ryan said in a typical reaction. “The executive branch is being held accountable to We the People.”
The victory was particularly sweet for former Speaker John A. Boehner, but it may have also been bittersweet. The suit was the brainchild of Mr. Boehner and members of his staff, who initiated it as a way to challenge the new health care law. They recognized that congressional Republicans were never going to be successful in repealing the health care law with Mr. Obama in the White House (i.e., the failed shutdown in 2013) and looked for a more fruitful way to undermine it.
Despite his efforts, Mr. Boehner was ultimately forced out of the speakership last year by a group of hard-right conservatives who viewed him as not aggressive enough in calling the administration to account. But their tactics failed, while his have produced some actual results, however the case ultimately turns out at the appeals court level.
