The Trump Promise Tracker
Will Donald Trump ever release his tax returns? That depends which Kellyanne Conway you believe.
In the “no” column, there’s the Kellyanne Conway who told ABC’s The Week, “The White House response is that he’s not going to release his tax returns.”
“We litigated this all through the election. People didn’t care,” the top aide said. “They voted for him, and let me make this very clear: Most Americans are—are very focused on what their tax returns will look like while President Trump is in office, not what his look like.”
Or you can believe the Kellyanne Conway who tweeted Monday morning:
On taxes, answers (& repeated questions) are same from campaign: POTUS is under audit and will not release until that is completed. #nonews
— Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) January 23, 2017
The president himself seems to be leaning toward the first model. During his sole press-conference as president-elect earlier this month, a reporter asked Trump whether he would release his tax returns to prove his claim that he has no dealings in Russia.
“I’m not releasing the tax returns because as you know, they’re under audit,” he said. (Trump has not offered any evidence that he is in fact under audit.) Then he added: “You know, the only one that cares about my tax returns are the reporters, OK? They’re the only who ask.” He said he didn’t think the public was concerned: “No I don’t think so. I won, when I became president. No, I don’t think they care at all. I don’t think they care at all.”
Conway and Trump are incorrect—polls show a majority of voter want him to produce the documents—but this process of give-and-take allows Trump to put off fulfilling his promise to release his taxes indefinitely. He’s never quite breaking the promise, since there’s always the possibility that he could do so in the future, when the alleged audit is concluded, but in the meantime, the constant (false) invocations of public opinion help smooth the way for Trump to never actually release them. The repeated insistence that the public doesn’t care might even have the perverse effect of convincing the public that it doesn’t care.
All politicians make campaign promises, though few made them with the abandon, spontaneity, and flamboyance of Donald Trump. During the campaign, he would casually guarantee vast and circumstantial shifts in policy, often saying he’d do them on day one. (tallied up the Republican nominee made.) These ranged from the monumental—the famous wall Trump vowed to build on the U.S. border with Mexico, with Mexican funds—to the vague (what does it mean to drain the swamp, exactly?) to the highly concrete, like his outlined expansion of the U.S. military.
