Trump's Tax Scandal - Who Cares?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 12 October 2018
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why has there been so little political fall-out from allegations by the New York Times that the US President and his family dodged hundreds of millions of dollars in tax, in some cases through outright fraud?
Manuela Saragosa speaks to Susanne Craig - one of the journalists making the claims after 18 months of painstaking research. Yet the US public remains unmoved. Bloomberg editor John Authers fears for what that says about the breakdown in trust in modern Western society.
Plus Pippa Malmgren, a former advisor to President George W Bush, explains why she thinks the tax investigation may represent a bigger threat to Donald Trump than the much-reported Mueller investigation.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Picture: Donald Trump; Credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuela Saragossa. Coming up, President Trump is probably a tax cheat. So says the New York Times after an exhausted investigation. We're not talking tens of millions. We're talking hundreds of millions, if not more than it. Yeah. I mean, what's owed is massive. President Trump's lawyer says the claims are false, |
| 0:23.0 | but is the real story that no one seems to care? There is a sense that everything to do with the |
| 0:28.2 | financial world is corrupt anyway, and you don't need to trust traditional media to tell you things. |
| 0:34.7 | That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:40.8 | Earlier this month, the New York Times published a 14,000 word expose on the apparently |
| 0:46.4 | opaque financial dealings of President Donald Trump and his family. The allegations are serious. |
| 0:52.4 | The paper said the president and his family had in all likelihood |
| 0:56.0 | shortchanged the government of hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid taxes, in some cases |
| 1:01.9 | via outright fraud. In a moment, we'll speak to the reporter who spent 18 months researching the story, |
| 1:08.1 | a story President Trump's lawyer has called false and defamatory. |
| 1:12.6 | But first, in another age, an investigation like this had the power to bring down a politician, |
| 1:17.5 | even a whole government. On Twitter, President Trump himself barely gave it his attention. |
| 1:23.0 | There was just a single tweet in which he called it, I quote, boring. But what about American voters? |
| 1:29.1 | Here's the view from a town in a state that voted overwhelmingly for President Trump, San Antonio, in Texas. |
| 1:35.5 | The New York Times is regularly putting out, I think, incorrect information. |
| 1:40.7 | So my first inclination is to just not believe anything they say. And do you think that's |
| 1:45.3 | like an opinion that a lot of your friends, neighbors, family share? Yes, I do. What if the |
| 1:49.8 | allegations turn out to be true? Then I would want to look into it and I'd reconsider and, you know, |
| 1:54.8 | maybe change my mind. But so far, the New York Times has been zero for zero. I already had a very low |
| 2:00.8 | opinion of Trump and I still a very low opinion of Trump, |
| 2:01.9 | and I still have a low opinion of Trump, and the article, |
| 2:06.1 | I feel like it's like he can do whatever he wants, |
... |
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