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Donald Trump Refuses To Disclose His Tax Rate, Says ‘It’s None Of Your Business’

By Shaunee Flowers
Published on: 08:50 PST, May 13, 2016

Donald Trump continues to refuse to release his tax returns, and now the assumed Republican nominee has said he won’t disclose his tax rate either. In a Friday interview with Good Morning America, Trump tried to explain away all of his excuses for not revealing his tax returns as Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have already done. Finally, the Republican frontrunner just said that he shouldn’t have to reveal his tax rate to voters because “it’s none of your business.”

Interviewer George Stephanopoulos asked Donald Trump outright if he felt like voters had a right to see his tax returns. The New York Times reported that Trump responded, “I don’t think they do but I do say this, I will really gladly give them — not going to learn anything but it’s under routine audit. When the audit ends I’m going to present them. That should be before the election. I hope it’s before the election.”

Does that mean that Trump might not release his tax returns before voters head to their polling places in November? While Trump did say that he will release his tax returns once a routine audit is complete, the Republican frontrunner’s current stall game is making voters wonder what they might find when he finally comes clean. The Daily Show even pointed out all the times that Trump has refused to produce his tax returns and the myriad of excuses he has used so far.

Trevor Noah pointed out in the Thursday night broadcast of The Daily Show via the Vox that Trump’s reasons for refusing to release his tax returns have changed a lot over the years. In 2011, Trump suggested that he might run for president someday and if he did, he would release his tax returns when Barack Obama released his birth certificate. It was days later that Obama did release his birth certificate, proving his birth state to be Hawaii as he had previously claimed.

In 2015, when it became apparent that Donald Trump really was going to run for president, the Republican nominee said that he was tying his tax return release to Hillary Clinton’s emails. Well, those have also been released.

Now that Trump is running out of reasons to hold back his tax returns, he’s in the middle of an audit. Trump even tried to put a little conspiracy behind it when he said, “I’m always audited by the IRS, which I think is very unfair. I don’t know, maybe because of religion, maybe because of the fact that I’m a strong Christian, and I feel strongly about it, and maybe there’s a bias.”

Trump was one of Mitt Romney’s biggest critics back in 2012 when Romney was running against Barack Obama. Although he finally did release the forms in September of that year, Romney was even more heavily criticized when it was learned that he pays a much lower tax rate than most Americans.

Now Mitt is firing back at the Donald Trump tax return refusal with a Facebook post that said, “It is disqualifying for a modern-day presidential nominee to refuse to release tax returns to the voters, especially one who has not been subject to public scrutiny in either military or public service.”

Trump is already laying the groundwork for the questions which may arise once the tax returns are made public. “I try very hard to pay as little tax as possible and have said that for the last two years,” Trump said before adding, “because this country wastes our money.”

The most non-transparent presidential hopeful since 1976 has already hinted that his audit might not be done before the election. There have been so many excuses at this point that voters should expect Donald Trump not to release his tax returns or any of the information within them.

Do you think Donald Trump is hurting his bid for the presidency by refusing to release his tax returns? Tell us what you think in the comments section below.

[Photo by Mark Lyons/Getty Images]

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