At long last, after years of baseless speculation and struggle sessions on cable news networks, Donald Trump’s fabled tax returns have been released, and members of the press are bubbling with excitement.

In an unprecedented abuse of power, Democrats in the House of Representatives decided to seize a private citizen’s taxes and dump them out into the public for no legitimate reason whatsoever. There was no constitutional oversight role being performed (because again, Trump is not in government), and certainly, there was no legitimate investigative purpose given they had no evidence of wrongdoing related to the work of Congress.

No, this was simply yet another episode of “get the bad orange man.” But because everything is stupid, we are going to have an entire news cycle about this topic for the umpteenth time.

Breaking News: After years of legal battles, House Democrats publicly released six years of Donald Trump’s tax records. Our reporters are examining the documents. https://t.co/Is167mYJyD

— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 30, 2022

To be sure, there’s nothing of note in the tax returns. How do I know? Because the Democrat-led committee that released them has spent the last year going over them with a fine-toothed comb, desperately searching for anything they can nail Trump with. Conspiracy theories (pushed in the mainstream) about Trump’s taxes have ranged from allegations of Russian collusion to tax fraud.

Yet, as I shared in my write-up on their report when it came out, the committee found absolutely nothing. The entire thing was such a dud that it was embarrassing to watch them stretch the fact that Trump had taken a loss on his taxes (i.e. completely legal) as a scandal. That was quite literally all they came up with. After years of hand-wringing and supposition about the former president being a tax cheat, tied at the hip with Vladimir Putin, the most they could find was that the presidency made Trump poorer.

With that said, am I supposed to believe that the reporters at The New York Times are going to find some bombshell that eluded months and months of searching by thirsty Democrat politicians and their staff? Yeah, I highly doubt that’s going to happen. Instead, what we are going to get is the Times rehashing things we already know, such as the completely unremarkable fact that Trump didn’t pay any income tax in 2020 because he didn’t make any income. They will then report those things are breathtaking revelations. Social media will do the rest. It’s the same tired game every single time.

Given the lack of anything scandalous in Trump’s taxes, it is fair to ask why he didn’t just release them years ago. He could have gotten in front of the feeding frenzy and it may have helped him with independents during the 2020 election to show that kind of transparency. I suppose the only reason Trump dragged this out as long as he did was to prove a point. Namely, because the left demanded his tax returns, he didn’t want to give them to them.

That’s just his style. I understand the sentiment, but I think he missed a golden opportunity to make them look really stupid when it mattered the most.