RUSH: Ah, they keep recycling things. Now we’re recycling Trump’s taxes, and they got him again, folks. They got him again. They thought they had him four years ago on this. They thought they had him three years ago on this. We can go back and look at audio sound bites as we used them then. Not necessary, but they thought they had him. Now they think they’ve got him again.

By the way, folks, isn’t the New York Times using this tax information to sway an election? Well, isn’t that illegal? Isn’t that meddling in an election? What’s the difference in this and whatever they alleged that the Russians were doing in 2016? So here we are.

Great to have you with us. We are locked and loaded, revved and ready. Telephone number, if you want to be on the program, is 800-282-2882. The email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.us.

The only thing I don’t like about this is it constantly keeps us on defense. They come out with these allegations — by the way, there’s gonna be more of this. You just have to get ready for it. This is actually delayed. It took ’em five days rather than the usual day and a half. That’s the spacing between so-called scandals that the Drive-By Media has or that the Democrats have that they drop. Five days. And you know why? Let me tell you why this is a total bust.

This tax business is a total bust because the primary reason the Democrats in the media wanted it was they were convinced that if they could get hold of Trump’s tax returns, that inside those returns would be evidence, irrefutable — or irrefutable, for those of you in Rio Linda — evidence that Trump had indeed meddled with the Russians, that Trump indeed owed all of his financial legitimacy to the Russians.

That this is why Trump never wanted to release them because inside those tax returns was the evidence that Trump and the Russians were in bed together. That Trump was a Russian agent. That Trump had gone to Russia to get bailed out. That it was the Russians who had propped Trump up financially. That it was the Russians that enabled Trump to remain financially solvent.

And of course there’s none of that. None of that is in Trump’s tax returns whatsoever. It didn’t stop ’em, though, folks. The entire inside-the-Beltway organization, the club, the deep state, they were beyond excited, orgasmic. They finally had Trump’s taxes, after years of a massive effort. And they were gonna show that Trump had no business being president. I think these tax returns do show that Trump was not being paid by Putin. There were no connections to Russia in here, Mr. Snerdley. None. Zip, zero, nada. Gigantic bomb-out.

And, as you listen to the media and even their experts try to analyze what they have in these tax returns, it is abundantly clear that television talking heads today, the journalists themselves and their so-called expert guests, do not understand or at least they’re pretending not to understand how running a business and managing assets works tax-wise. They are literally portraying themselves as dummkopfs. They are portraying themselves as ignoramuses here.

And whether they really are or not remains to be seen, but they’re portraying themselves this way, and I think maybe they’re doing it in a way to try to relate to most people who would not understand these things. But let me tell you something. Unlike Joe Biden, Donald Trump has not profited from being in office. He hasn’t profited a dime.

So far Trump has donated everything he’s made, in terms of his presidential salary, back to the government, something few presidents other than Herbert Hoover and JFK have done. Most other presidents have kept the money ’cause they needed it. But Trump has given it all back. He’s never even received it.

Now, the left is betting that this New York Times story and another one that will be coming out in October will be Trump’s undoing. And you know what? Like everything else, I don’t think it’s gonna matter to Trump’s base. I don’t think his tax stuff is gonna matter one whit to the people who plan on voting for Donald Trump.

Now, is it gonna make a difference with independents and so forth? Who knows. All we can do is go back and look at history. And it was the case that back in — let’s see – I already put this stuff to the back of Stack because I had no intention of using it. Remember when what’s-her-face, Rachel Maddow, had one page of Trump’s tax returns and did almost two, three hours of exclusive promotion, had one page. One page. And I can’t remember what year that was. But they went bonkers over it. I think it was 2016, 2018, somewhere in there, that they tried the very same things.

Let me tell you what these tax returns indicate. Now, the New York Times, the Drive-By Media, they are totally focused on finding tax crimes, finding connections to Russia. And all they have found is that maybe Trump’s not the billionaire business genius that he’s played so well on TV. Maybe Trump has benefited from a great PR operation. But there isn’t any crime in any of this. Okay. So Trump may not be a billionaire. I don’t know. But it’s not a crime if he can convince Forbes and other people that he is. I mean, Forbes is not a legal entity. They are a publication that runs gossip information on how much people earn. They’ve established a lot of credibility, but they don’t operate under force of law or with the permission of law.

In other words, the IRS cannot go to Forbes — they can’t come to you. Let’s say that Forbes magazine in their annual list of a hundred richest people that matter has me on the list as number 9 at say $95 million, the IRS cannot come to me and say, “Wait a minute. You’re not reporting that number.” I didn’t tell Forbes that. They can’t do it. So none of this has any force of legality — whatever Forbes or any of these other publications say about how much Trump has or how much he’s worth or how much he’s earned, doesn’t matter. The IRS has the goods. What the taxpayer files is what the IRS goes on.

Now, they might want to try to audit somebody based on these disparities, but it doesn’t happen. Trust me on this, folks. It doesn’t happen. It was March 2017 that Rachel Maddow hyped the Trump tax story. She literally just had one or two pages. It was the funniest damn thing. And she had the entire left salivating. I mean, they were dripping blood. Blood was coming out of every bodily orifice they had. They really thought — Rachel Maddow. Rachel Maddow. She wouldn’t lie. Rachel Maddow would not tease us.

And that’s all she was doing ’cause Rachel Maddow doesn’t understand tax returns or taxes at the level we are talking about here with Donald Trump. Rachel Maddow is an employee. There is no way employees can possibly understand the taxes or the financial affairs of self-employed people or people that run businesses, own them, operate them.

Hell, Biden himself tried to play games with the tax code to avoid paying Medicare and other taxes, payroll taxes by filing as an S-Corp. And it’s legal. John Edwards did it. All kinds of people do it. What gets them on it is hypocrisy. Let me explain how the S-Corp thing works. And we’ll use Medicare as an example. ‘Cause Medicare is the latest addition to the payroll tax.

I may have the numbers slightly wrong here, but the theory and the data is accurate. So you have under the new law some years ago now, in addition to the FICA and the payroll tax for Social Security, everybody has 3% that they must pay to Medicare, Medicaid, whatever it is. However, there are ways around this. You can limit the 3% of what? 3% of what are you gonna pay? So if you structure yourself as a Subchapter S corporation, what you essentially do is assign yourself as the company president, and then you pay yourself a salary.

And let’s say that your company overall generates $1 million in revenue in a given year. But you don’t pay yourself a million dollars on paper. Under the subchapter S, you pay yourself $50,000 a year as your salary. And guess what? That’s what your Medicare tax payment of 3% is based on. Well, John Edwards did this. Biden and his family have done it, all kinds of people do. And when Biden did it, nobody did a big-ass story in the New York Times about how Joe Biden was attempting to skirt his tax payment responsibilities.

Now, they did eventually go after John Edwards on this, but that was because they lost control of the Edwards situation, ’cause he had an affair, illegitimate kid, and it got to the point they couldn’t save Edwards. So once it became time to get rid of him they threw the kitchen sink at him. Now, this is how a lot of people — and, by the way, it’s members of Congress that create the Subchapter S corporation. There are C-Corps, S-Corps, there’s any number of ways you can structure yourself.

And if you structure yourself as an S-Corp you can limit your health care payments, you can limit any number, because you can limit how much you pay yourself. So you have a company. Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, Fraud Experts, et al, whatever, and their company generates let’s say three and a half million a year that comes from Chinese. Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, three and a half million dollars a year. They file as a sub-S and they pay themselves $50,000 each. So that’s what they pay income taxes on, that’s what they pay Medicare, that’s what their payroll taxes, $50,000 a year.

“Well, wait, Rush, what happens to the other three million 450 thousand?” That’s exactly right. What happens to that money? It’s still theirs. It’s is there in the corporation. Maybe they come along and they hire other family members, maybe they set up a nonprofit along with the Sub-S. But there’s any number of ways they maintain control of all that money. It’s their corporation. It’s just they don’t pay themselves a salary.

The most famous way is to bonus the employee. So you pay yourself a salary of 50 grand, and then you bonus yourself a couple million at the end of the year. You don’t pay any taxes. Well, you’ll pay so income tax on the bonus, but you will not pay Medicare, and you won’t pay Social Security or payroll taxes on how much you are bonused. And Biden did this. I just want everybody to know the Biden family did this. I’ve got the story in the Stack here somewhere, and it’s these kinds of things that Trump did.

The main thing that Trump did, looking at this, the main thing that Trump is doing is putting more money into his businesses than he’s taking out. And who knows. It may be wise or legal, he’s chosen to do it this way. One thing, he’s an expert at moving money around to avoid paying taxes, and he’s really an expert at making those who loan him money as vulnerable as he is. They can’t call the loans on him. They’d go down the tubes if he does. So he’s a master at this.

These tax returns show that he is a master at using the tax code legally. If Trump had done all of this illegal stuff after all of these years, it would have caught up with him by now. Now, the Drive-Bys are focusing in on a $72 million refund. And they’re trying to say that that $72 million refund was illegal. It’s made up of phony losses and so forth. Well, that’s up to the IRS, folks, to go after people that lie or file false returns or what have you.

And they do it if they think that somebody’s gaming the system or that they can get money out of them. And they haven’t done it with Trump yet. So now Trump is gonna be forced to explain all this tax stuff? Shouldn’t there be some outrage directed at Congress and the guy who’s been in government for 47 years, Joe Biden, for creating a tax code like this that smart citizens simply go out and hire the smartest other citizens they can find to use it to their greatest benefit?

Why didn’t Biden do something about the tax laws in all of his years as a senator if he’s gonna sit there and act so outraged that a citizen would try to take as much advantage of the tax laws as he or she can? The thing about Donald Trump, this guy, he can keep 20 plates spinning at all times. He is indefatigable and he’s organized and he can keep track of a whole bunch of different things going on at the same time.

And that mind-set and way of dealing with a lot of issues at one time is what’s made him such a success in solving so many issues that he has taken on as president that have plagued this country for decades. Trump has solved so many things in three and a half years that previous presidents have claimed to want to fix but have just ever been gotten around to it.

It is unique in Washington to solve problems. It is unique to fix things. Washington generally doesn’t do this. They don’t want taxpayers or citizens to think that it’s that easy. Trump comes along and literally reignited an economy that had been stagnated for eight years, stagnating under Obama.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Then you’ve got this New York Times story — I’m sorry. The tax story, it’s a dud. It is a dud measured against their expectations and their hopes.

They were convinced that Trump’s taxes would reveal evidence of collusion with Putin and with Russia. They were dead certain that Trump’s tax returns — this is why Trump didn’t want to reveal them — that Trump’s tax returns would show massive ties, humongous involvement between Trump and Russian oligarchs and their businesses and Putin. That Russia had basically underwritten Trump’s businesses. That without Russia, Trump’s businesses would have gone bankrupt years ago.

They thought all of that would be in Trump’s tax returns. And on that basis, it is a total bomb for them. None of the rest of the tax story is news when you get right down to it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s Dory in Phoenix. It’s great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hello, Rush. I’m calling because I wanted to clarify some things that the average media idiot and Democrat doesn’t understand or don’t understand about taxes, business taxes, ’cause they don’t have real jobs and they don’t own their own businesses. And we are in the real estate business. And Trump’s tax returns make absolute, perfect sense to us.

For one thing, they talk about losses. Losses are nothing more than business expenses. So that doesn’t mean, “Oh, he’s a bad businessman! He lost money.” Also, he took only legal real estate deductions and only an idiot wouldn’t take every legal deduction that you can. In 2020, the new law that he signed into law is actually harder on real estate professionals like us.

Because my husband’s goal in life has been not to pay taxes for years, and in 2020 we’re gonna pay a lot more taxes than we ever have with our real estate business because of the new tax law that’s in place, which means it also hurts Trump. He actually signed a law that hurts his business a little more. So he’s not trying to get away with anything, and —

RUSH: You know the proof of that? The proof… This is the thing. The proof of that is that the IRS has never tried to collect anything from him for all these years. The IRS is the collection agency. That’s it, period. Forbes magazine or any of these other people that reported how much Trump earned and how much he paid in taxes don’t know diddly-squat.

If the IRS gave Trump a $72 million refund and has not tried to recoup it in 10 years or eight or five, then it means they’ve looked at it and they can’t find anything irregular about it. But here comes the New York Times — and since nobody can relate to a $72 million refund, why, there has to be something illegal about it. But the IRS cannot comment.

The IRS can’t call a press conference and say, “We’ve looked at the president’s tax returns, and we have found no irregularities, whatsoever.” They can’t comment on any taxpayer’s taxes. That’s why when Forbes magazine runs these richest American guys lists and they list somebody earning $95 million last year, the IRS can’t look at what Forbes says…

Well, they could if they wanted. I mean, if they gonna audit somebody, they could say, “Now, Forbes said that you earned $95 million,” as a means of pressure. They cannot cite Forbes legally. Forbes has nothing to do with taxes or tax collection or tax audits. Neither does anybody else in the journalism business. So the fact that the IRS has not sought any repayment…

Now, Trump is under audit, and they might at some point down the road, but they haven’t in all of these years. That’s all anybody would have to know. But that’s not the purpose perform grab audio sound bite number 30. This is A.B. Stoddard today on Andrea Mitchell…

STODDARD: There are disaffected Trump Republicans who are disappointed in the federal response to the virus, who are struggling financially, who are telling pollsters they don’t think that the presidents is trying to bring the country together. Voters that were potentially in Trump’s coalition — they voted for him in 2016, maybe they were with him in 2017 and 2018 — and he’s beginning to lose them. His coalition is shrinking. And those are the kinds of voters — if there are disappointed with Trump, and they’re not just a member of his ever-loyal base — then this kind of story, the revelations from the New York Times, certainly I think, will factor into their decision.

RUSH: She hopes. She doesn’t know diddly-squat. A.B. Stoddard is claiming that there’s a bunch of non-base Trump Republican voters. They’re Trump voters, but they’re not in the base, meaning they’re not white hayseed hicks and members of a cult. And this story about the taxes, this is gonna turn them off. This is gonna lose them.

That’s what she’s hoping, and therefore that’s what she turns around and is reporting. “Those are the kinds of voters, if they’re already disappointed with Trump and this or that…” That’s why they did the story. They’re still trying to bust up Trump’s base, coalition, whatever it is.