Paul Ryan predicts Donald Trump tax revelations won't really hurt him
Speaker Paul Ryan said Monday that the bombshell report about Donald Trump potentially not paying federal income taxes for up to 18 years won’t really hurt him.
“I don’t think it’s that harmful,” Ryan said before a fundraising event in Michigan, according to The Detroit Free Press. “I think people who don’t like him are going to continue disliking him.”
Ryan also doubts the story from The New York Times, published Saturday night, will damage Trump’s reputation as a great businessman, according to the report, adding that it’s common in real estate to use net operating losses for tax purposes.
“The numbers are big because he’s a multibillionaire,” Ryan said, according to the report.
The New York Times reported Saturday that it had received three pages of Trump’s tax returns from 1995 from an anonymous person and the records show that he declared a $916 million loss that year, which could have allowed him to avoid paying federal income taxes for up to 18 years.
Since the report went public, his allies have called him a “genius” if he didn’t wind up paying taxes for nearly two decades. On Monday evening, he said he “brilliantly used” tax laws to pay a little tax as legally possible.
Ryan announced in June that he would support Trump for president.
