Like all rational people, Rachel Maddow despises Donald Trump and wants to see his tax returns released. Unfortunately, like all corporate ratings hounds, Rachel Maddow is also perfectly willing to stir up the hype machine over literally nothing. And so we have this:
HOLY SHIT, right? This tweet caused a number of my liberal friends to send me breathless texts about flipping to MSNBC at 9 p.m. Eastern so that I could waste my goddamn time watching Maddow pontificate about why we need to see Trump’s returns (we know why already!) and then show a single lonely form from Trump’s 2005 tax returns — a form that reporter David Cay Johnston, who received the “leak,” said may well have been leaked by Trump himself. That was exactly my thought before he even came on the TV and said so; nothing could possibly make more sense.
After all, this is just a small part of a 2005 return, and what does it show? That he made a lot of money and paid a lot of taxes (at least the raw number). In other words, it shows everything Trump wants to show in his tax returns and hides everything that everyone cares about seeing — and it lets him continue the narrative of how bad and evil the “leakers” are, even though it’s probably Trump himself (or someone in his inner circle) doing the leaking here.
We already know that Trump is willing to leak things about himself, including falsehoods, and we know he knows how to play the media like a fiddle. He played the hell out of Rachel Maddow today; in her rush to deliver her big scoop and gain a moment’s ratings boost, she discredited herself and gave us a prime example of how members of the media play into Trump’s “fake news” narrative like so many unwitting pawns. As a result of her ill-advised rush to “break” this “news,” we’re sure to see days of Trump surrogates playing up how much money he made in 2005 and how he paid $30 million in taxes that one year… and how the government needs to crack down on these unconscionable leakers.
Oh, man, if only it would crack down on the leaker-in-chief.