MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow took so long to get to the big reveal of Donald Trump’s 2005 tax return, we had time to catch it on The Daily Beast while we waited.
Daily Beast contributor David Cay Johnston has obtained what appear to be the first two pages of Trump’s 2005 federal income tax return, and published an analysis of those pages on his website, DCReport.org. The Daily Beast could not independently verify these documents.
There’s a whole lot of yawn
The documents show Trump and his wife Melania paying $5.3 million in regular federal income tax—a rate of less than 4% However, the Trumps paid an additional $31 million in the so-called “alternative minimum tax,” or AMT. Trump has previously called for the elimination of this tax.
What that shows is Donald Trump paid a hell of a lot of money in taxes in 2005.
And not much we didn’t know from his prior released 1995 return:
Trump’s 2005 return also shows that he’d continued to benefit from the roughly $916 million loss he reported in his 1995 return—published last year by The New York Times. Using a loophole Congress closed in 1996, Trump converted that loss into a tax credit for the same amount he could offset against income.
But Maddow decided to go full sail down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole before announcing what was already on the internet.
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