Donald Trump said Hillary Clinton could have changed the tax laws when "she was in the United States Senate, but she didn’t.” | Getty Trump on his tax moves: Clinton should have changed the law

Donald Trump, still on defense in the wake of revelations about his tax returns and huge losses his businesses sustained in the 1990s, tried to put the focus on his opponent on Tuesday, arguing that Hillary Clinton should have changed the tax laws he benefited from while she was a senator.

“I ask a simple question: Why didn’t she ever try to change those laws so I couldn’t use them?” Trump said, addressing supporters at a rally in Prescott Valley, Arizona. “You know why? She could have changed the laws when she was in the United States Senate, but she didn’t.”


A weekend report in The New York Times that Trump lost nearly $1 billion in the mid-1990s has left the Republican nominee’s camp reeling as surrogates have attempted to contain its damage to the campaign. Trump could have legally used the loss to avoid paying federal income taxes for 18 years, experts told the Times, which published three pages from the candidate’s 1995 returns that the newspaper received from an anonymous tipster.

Clinton and her supporters have seized on the revelations to double down on their portrayal of Trump as an out-of-touch billionaire whose business acumen is less robust than he claims. Trump surrogates including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani have argued that the returns show that the Republican nominee is a “genius” who knows the ins and outs of the tax code.

Looking to spin the story in a direction more favorable to his campaign again on Tuesday, Trump took on the Democratic nominee’s record in the Senate, saying: “She named a few buildings, that’s all she did.”

Trump asserted that Clinton did not change the tax laws in question because her campaign donors benefit from the same ones. He cited George Soros and Warren Buffett, both billionaires and Clinton supporters who in the past reported their own large losses — in Buffett’s case, $873 million in 2014.

“Did they write off those losses? Oh, I doubt it,” Trump said, before promising to “fix” the tax code and make it “fair.”

Clinton was elected to the Senate in 2000, several years after Trump claimed the huge loss on his tax returns, and over eight years representing New York on Capitol Hill, she had many more responsibilities than choosing building titles.

Some critics, though, have pointed to her role in naming a courthouse after Thurgood Marshall as evidence that her list of accomplishments is short. Among Trump’s better moments in his first debate against Clinton last week were when he challenged her on what she had done in her decades in public service.