JULIAN ZELIZER:
Welcome back to Then and Now. I’m Julian Zelizer ofThe Long View.
JONATHAN ALTER:
And I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
Well, Jon, President Trump’s not the first president to have a complicated relationship with the IRS. President Richard Nixon also did.
And I think there were three ways in which Nixon had problems or controversy.
One involved his taxes, and in 1973 stories about charitable deductions that he had taken, which wiped away his tax obligations involving vice presidential papers, ultimately led to the release of his tax returns, which then became a precedent, and Jimmy Carter did it as a candidate in 1976. But there were questions about his own taxes.
Second were revelations later on that he tried to pressure the IRS into using audits against opponents and being friendly with his friends, even though the IRS commissioner resisted doing that.
And finally, stories about using the IRS to go after the tax-exempt status of organizations connected to the anti-war movement and more.
So this became a big part of the Watergate investigations and his legacy.
Is Trump worse than Nixon on all of these matters?
JONATHAN ALTER:
That’s what we’re not quite sure of yet, because Nixon was really bad, and he also paid little in taxes himself. He paid $1,000 on $200,000 of income. That’s more than Trump paid in 2016 and 2017, where he paid $800 on his millions and millions of dollars in income.
So I guess you can usually safely say that Trump is going to be worse, but there’s some interesting dimensions to the Nixon story that I was reminded of when I was looking into it a little bit.
One is that Nixon threatened to prosecute George Wallace on taxes if he ran again as an independent in 1972. So you might remember that Wallace ran as a Democrat, and he actually got shot during that campaign. But Nixon, because Wallace had almost cost him the election in ‘68, was worried that he would run again as an independent, so he basically blackmailed him and said, “You can run for president, but only as a Democrat, not as an independent.” I found that kind of interesting.
And then I was reminded that when Nixon had some papers backdated in violation of the law, the guy who did that was a fantastic guy, Ralph Newman, who owned the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, which I go to to this day in Chicago.
And he ended up, I think, going to prison over this, over misappraising these documents at Nixon’s direction. It was an example of how it’s often the peripheral people who suffer the real consequences when the president does something.
And then, finally, it was on taxes that Nixon famously said in 1973, “I am not a crook.” That was in response to some of these questions about his taxes, and they did become part of the House impeachment inquiry.
So Trump is now saying that he will never, never be able to be audited. If the Democrats get the Congress, the first thing they should do is pass a bill saying, “No, he must be audited, if necessary, like any other American,” and watch him veto that bill. It can pass with 51 votes. It is a tax measure, and watch him veto that bill.
So I think that’ll be a big issue next year if the Democrats take both houses of Congress.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
Well, thank you. That was Then and Now. Interesting look. Follow the money, look at the IRS. It all gets to the heart of presidential politics with two administrations, and we’ll be back next week.
Go Knicks!
JONATHAN ALTER:
Bye-bye.
