by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
Donald Trump has been denigrating China for several years now. He began by claiming that the Chinese government had been an unfair trading partner with the United States and moved to rectify the trade imbalance by imposing a series of tariffs of Chinese products that were coming into the US - except those products that were being imported by businesses headed by his daughter. What Trump's move actually did, though, was raise prices on Chinese goods sold in the United States - higher prices that had to be paid by American consumers, and gave the Chinese government an excuse to raise tariffs on American products and agricultural commodities heading to China, a move that bankrupted some American businesses and farming operations.
Trump's "trade war" with China was a venture that the United States quickly lost.
Early this year when the coronavirus pandemic germinated in China and began spreading around the globe, Trump initially praised the Chinese quick response to the situation, but as numbers of cases in the United States began rising rapidly, instead of rolling up his sleeves and getting to work on leading the country through the crisis, Trump decided that a better response would be to get our country focused on casting blame in lieu of taking measures to limit the spread of the disease - and China was his obvious target. Not only did the virus originate there, but the Chinese people were of a different racial stock which should help to keep his racist political base inflamed.
And lately Trump has even been trying to tie the Biden family to China, implying that there were some secret cash connections between the Bidens and China - and that those ties would be sinister in nature, especially when compared to the Trump family business dealings with Russia, a country that Trump seemed to go to great lengths to avoid displeasing.
The Trump drumbeat was that Russia was our friend, and China definitely was not.
So it was surprising when the New York Times reported yesterday that the Trump Organization, which is wholly owned by Donald John Trump, has a heretofore secret bank account in China. The account is apparently controlled by the hotel component of the Trump Organization. A lawyer for the Trump companies said that the account had been set up to handle some business efforts that the company was involved in before Trump took office as president of the US, and that it was also used to pay local Chinese taxes. The attorney said that the account contained only a few thousand dollars, but records indicate that it was used to pay out $188,561 in taxes to China between 2013 and 2015. That amount in taxes would indicate that Trump had significant business dealings with China during that period of time.
The $188,561 that Trump paid in taxes to China is also considerably more than the taxes he paid to the US government during that same period of time.
And, the existence of the Chinese bank account was not reported on Trump's public financial disclosures that he filed when he ran for office - disclosures that he said were more revealing about his actual worth than his tax returns would have been.
The New York Times current examination of recently unearthed Trump tax documents also revealed bank accounts in Ireland and the United Kingdom that were not listed in Trump's public financial disclosures. Those accounts were reportedly related to Trump's golf resorts.
Donald Trump is suggesting that Joe Biden has some sinister money connection to China, an assertion that he seems to have fabricated. But Trump apparently has his own money connection to China - and instead of being forthcoming, he chose to hide it.
Americans need and deserve to know about the financial obligations of our leaders. With whom do they have financial ties, and to whom are they beholden? Anyone running for a statewide or national office - to include applicants for federal judgeships - should provide at least their ten most recent tax returns, national and state, and a full financial disclosure.
Anything less places the security of our nation at risk.
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