What's 'Boring' About Tax Fraud, Mr. President?

Poor President Trump. So easily bored.

The New York Times runs a story the length of a small novel this week, which completely destroys the myth of Donald Trump as a self-made man, reporting that he and his family engaged in what might have been outright fraud on their tax payments.

And in a tweet, the president declares the story, “boring.”

What does it take to excite this guy? Making fun of a woman who says she was sexually assaulted? Would that do it?

Yeah, that must be the ticket. Because at the same time he finds The Times report “boring” about the many times Trump’s daddy Fred propped him up with millions of dollars, this president decides to mock Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.

She’s the one whose heart-wrenching testimony in front of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee last week cast such a menacing shadow over Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

In his speech on Monday evening, Oct. 1, in Southaven, Miss., Trump pretended to be Dr. Ford. He ridiculed her testimony. She’s the one who testified under oath that Kavanaugh sexually assault her while his friend Mark Judge watched, and she remembered “the two of them laughing,” having a good time at her expense while she wondered if she was going to survive.

She’s the one whose testimony was so compelling – so heartbreaking, actually – that even this president said she was “a very credible witness” and “a very fine woman.” That is, until it became politically profitable, in front of a big home crowd in Mississippi, to make fun of her.

Well, he needed escape from the self-pronounced boredom he felt over The Times story.

Yeah, real boring, Mr. President.

This is the same Donald Trump who’s always said he got his start in business with a “small” loan from his father. A $1 million loan, he’s always said, which doesn’t sound so “small” to a lot of us.

According to The Times piece – put together by three seasoned reporters over the past 18 months from confidential tax returns, financial records and interviews – Trump’s daddy actually steered him the equivalent of $413 million from his real estate empire from the time Trump was a baby to this day.

“Much of this money,” The Times says, “came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show.”

Yes, yes, so boring to read such allegations.

So understand something, as you reach for your own copy of The Times bombshell: understand that it wasn’t just three veteran journalists, working an unheard-of 18 months, to put this together. Whatever they wrote was examined with microscopes, not only by levels of editors but by high-paid lawyers and tax experts as well.

That’s the nature of big league journalism. Especially when you’re accusing the president of the United States.

He may find it boring, but there are prosecutors who may find another name for it.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, is now in paperback.