Welcome to America, 2017. Meet the newest attempt to force Donald Trump to abide by the same ethical standards as every other would-be leader of the nation.
[New York City] Councilman Corey Johnson plans to introduce legislation that would require a very specific subset of vendors with contracts for city concessions to turn over the “personal tax returns of any individual named in the entity.”
How specific is it? It only applies to one vendor: Trump Ferry Point LLC, the company behind Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point, the massively expensive municipal golf course in the Bronx that Trump's company now runs.
“He’s making tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars off of city property with his name emblazoned all over it," Johnson (D-Manhattan) said, "and this is a leverage point to try to peek into his tax returns."
The fun part is that if Donald Trump had truly divested from his businesses he wouldn't be on the paperwork and this ploy probably wouldn't work. His lack of ethics in his businesses is now being used as lever against his lack of ethics in his taxes.
Will it pass? The council currently is made up of 47 Democrats and only three Republicans, so it's possible. Will Donald Trump tie it up in lawsuits for years? Almost certainly. But it's yet another path toward forcing the crooked bastard to abide by the ethical norms that, until Captain Blowhard showed up, both parties simply presumed were so obvious they didn't need to be encoded into law. What future American populace would be so stupid that they'd elect someone who couldn't—and wouldn't—prove they weren't brazenly corrupt?