What Is Donald Trump Hiding?

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From the Washington Post:

Trump remains the least transparent major presidential nominee in modern history. He is the first since 1976 to refuse to release his tax returns. He has declined to provide documentation of the “tens of millions” of dollars he claims to have donated to charity. He has yet to release a comprehensive accounting of his health. And, while Wednesday’s letter about Melania Trump’s immigration from her home country offers a few new details, there is no documentation to back up the claims.

In summary:

  • Trump says he’s a billionaire, but refuses to release his tax returns to prove it.
  • He says he’s a brilliant businessman but refuses to release any corporate financials to prove it.
  • He says he gives millions to charity, but refuses to release any records to prove it.

In the end, though, he gets away with this because everyone sort of assumes he’s just bullshitting about this stuff anyway. That’s too bad. It’s pretty obvious that these records would put Trump in a bad light, and the reason he doesn’t release them is that he figures the hit from being non-transparent is less than the hit he’d take from voters knowing the truth. He’s almost certainly right about that, but only because he’s not really taking much of a hit from being non-transparent. The only way to force candidates to be accountable is to hold their feet to the fire if they aren’t, and this just isn’t happening with Trump.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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