Trump's tax dodging (or cheating) would seem easier to accept for independent voters leaning towards MAGA.
David Cay Johnston has followed Trump's taxes for decades:
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/1/3/trump_taxes_david_cay_johnston
"DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, that Donald used a number of legal devices to reduce taxes is no surprise. But he did something absolutely brazen. And that requires we go back to 1984.
"That was the year Trump Tower was selling apartments like crazy and his first casino opened. So he had Amazons of cash flowing into his pockets. He filed a tax return that included something called a Schedule C.
"That’s what freelancers use.
"It’s what I use for my book writing business. And on it, he showed no revenue but over $600,000 of expenses. Auditors from the City of New York and the state of New York spotted that, disallowed it.
"Trump demanded trials.
"He lost both.
"The judges wrote scathing opinions about what he was doing.
"So, what turns up in these six years of tax returns? Well, he filed 65 of Schedule Cs. Twenty-six of them had zero revenue and hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses.
"There were a handful of others
where the income and the expenses, exactly to the dollar, equaled out, which is impossible to believe is anything but manipulation.
"For those 26 returns, where he was on notice that it’s illegal to create a fictitious business and take deductions, he could easily be prosecuted, either by the federal government or Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, for cheating on state taxes the same way. And that, I think, is the most brazen thing in there."
