THE ISSUE
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton hasn’t held a press conference in 261 days, according to a counter maintained by Philip Bump, of The Washington Post. Donald Trump has been reticent about complying with another convention of American presidential politics: releasing his tax returns. He says he’s under an Internal Revenue Service audit, and so his attorneys have advised him against releasing his tax returns until the audit is completed.
In this “Alice in Wonderland,” up-is-down, down-is-up presidential election year, almost nothing is going as we’d expect.
We have one nominee who won’t release his tax returns. And we have another who avoids press conferences as if they were encounters with Zika-bearing mosquitoes.
Neither inspires confidence that he or she will govern with transparency. Sadly, this won’t make for much of a change.
The Obama administration has been chided repeatedly by the Society of Professional Journalists because of the excessive measures it has taken to control media coverage and to curtail access to government sources.
And now we have two presidential candidates who are secretive in their own, not-so-special ways.
That Trump doesn’t want us to see his tax returns invites the obvious question: Why?
Former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney believes there may be a “bombshell” in Trump’s returns. If so, what might it be?
Is Trump not a billionaire, as he claims? Does he do business with Russian oligarchs? Does he pay little or no tax at all? Do his charitable contributions compare to those of pre-haunting Ebenezer Scrooge?
As PolitiFact points out and the Tax History Project confirms, every presidential nominee since Richard Nixon — save for Gerald Ford, who released only summary data — has released his tax returns.
There’s no legal requirement to do so, though a U.S. senator has introduced a bill that would make it one. But it’s a campaign tradition, and a good one, for this reason: How much a candidate gives to charity can be revealing. So, too, can be how much he or she earns — and how.
We now know, for instance, that Hillary and Bill Clinton gave nearly 10 percent of their income last year to charity — mostly to the Clinton Family Foundation (a distinct entity from the Clinton Foundation). The Clintons paid an effective federal tax rate of 34 percent, according to The Wall Street Journal. And they earned a gross income of $10.6 million in 2015 (compared to $28 million in 2014), mostly through speaking fees.
“It’s striking that for a rich person, her tax return is very boring,” Len Burman, director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center and a Treasury Department official in the Clinton administration, told The Wall Street Journal.
Do you know what wouldn’t be boring? A Hillary Clinton press conference. That would be banner news, as exciting and unexpected at this point as a unicorn sighting. And it would be interesting to hear Clinton expound on those speaking fees she and her husband earned, and who paid them.
The closest Clinton has come to giving a press conference was her Aug. 5 appearance at a joint convention of the National Associations of Black Journalists and Hispanic Journalists in Washington.
Clinton spent most of her time delivering prepared remarks, answering only a few questions in what NPR described as a “moderated Q&A” rather than the free-for-all that is an actual press conference.
According to the news site of The Poynter Institute, a journalism training organization, Washington Post journalist Ed O’Keefe said this to Clinton: “We encourage you to do this more often with reporters across the country, especially those news organizations that travel the country with you wherever you go.”
Clinton, of course, had no response. Because she couldn’t possibly give a good answer to O’Keefe’s eminently reasonable request.
Clinton may have her reasons for being wary of the press. But her wariness doesn’t inspire a lot of trust, and for a candidate who’s already seen as untrustworthy, that’s not good.
Journalists are the conduits between the candidates and the public. One way we measure our political leaders is how they respond to the pressure of a news conference; it gives some insight into how they will lead.
Trump, we know, has banned whole news organizations from covering his campaign. He denounces the media, and urges his crowds to shout angry insults at reporters. Indeed, we worry for the safety of the journalists who cover his campaign. (NBC reporter Katy Tur needed the Secret Service to escort her from a Trump rally in December after Trump attacked her by name.)
As for those who cover Clinton, we worry they’ll be lulled to sleep by her silence, which endures day after day after day. More importantly, we are aggrieved on behalf of the voters who aren’t getting the answers they deserve.
