Story highlights Issac Bailey: Donald Trump has fashioned himself as some kind of blue-collar billionaire, ready to fight for the common man

But he has pushed for a tax policy whose primary benefits would go directly to wealthy men such as himself, Bailey says

Issac Bailey has been a journalist in South Carolina for two decades and was most recently the primary columnist for The Sun News in Myrtle Beach. He was a 2014 Harvard University Nieman fellow. Follow him on Twitter: @ijbailey. The views expressed are his own.

(CNN) To fully appreciate the scandal revealed by Donald Trump's 1995 tax returns, legal as it was, you need to know the story of a woman named Lucille Scott.

In 2002, Scott bought a used double-wide trailer in Socastee, South Carolina. Her $50,000 loan came with a 17.25 percent interest rate -- nearly triple the average rate for a traditional home at the time, akin to buying a house with a credit card.

Issac Bailey

That price tag did not include the cost of the land, which she had to lease, but did include leaks in the ceilings and the walls and floor and a host of other things that needed repair the moment she put the key in the front doorknob. Scott had good credit and a job and wanted a house. But she knew next to nothing about real estate, so when a man came to her church passionately talking about how God told him to help people get into a home, she listened, believing her prayers had been answered.

Scott lost that used trailer within months of purchase because she couldn't afford the $734 mortgage payment -- which didn't include the $200 monthly land lease -- with her $8 an hour housekeeping job and still be able to take care of a 77-year-old mother slowed by strokes.

Scott's good credit rating, something she had prided herself on having established by finding ways to always pay her bills, disintegrated and made her life nearly impossible to manage for years. Her ability to buy a home in the future was essentially nullified.

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