Reid accuses Trump of overstating wealth

Seeking to shake up a tight presidential race, Sen. Harry Reid declared Tuesday on the Senate floor that Donald Trump is a “swindler” who is “not as rich as he would have us believe" — as the Nevada Democrat moved to reprise the 2012 strategy that saw him hammer Mitt Romney repeatedly over his tax returns.

Several times on Tuesday, the Senate minority leader called out Trump for declining to release his tax returns, suggesting that it’s because those documents would show that Trump has far less wealth than he’s claimed. Trump has said his net worth is $10 billion.


“He was born with an inheritance but lost his daddy’s wealth. … That’s why Donald Trump won’t release his tax returns. That’s certainly one of the reasons, of course: He is not worth nearly as much as he claims to be. That’s a secret he doesn’t want anyone to know,” Reid said in a scathing speech. “He wants everyone to think he’s this big, rich, rich man.”

With just a handful of congressional days in session before the election, Reid is unleashing increasingly heated attacks on Trump and Senate Republicans supporting him. Last week, he called Trump a “human leech” and suggested the business mogul is overweight, dropping the kinds of political bombs that most pro-Hillary Clinton Democrats wouldn’t touch.

For Reid, there’s less downside than for almost all other high-profile Democratic surrogates: He’s retiring in September and is looking to make as much of a mark on the race as he can. In a sit-down interview on Monday, he emphasized that Trump cannot sustain a charge in the polls that now has him closer than ever to catching Clinton, declaring that “American polling is such a joke.”

“I’ve always been a pessimist; that’s just my nature,” Reid said in his office. “Despite my base pessimism, I’m convinced that this election is turning. What Trump has done in the last couple weeks, you can’t overcome that. You can’t do it.”

While Reid has previously lit into Trump for his business dealings, his comments about income taxes on Tuesday are reminiscent of Reid’s efforts to paint Romney as a tax dodger in 2012, when Reid repeatedly came to the floor to declare that Romney did not pay any income taxes. Although his claims were ultimately unproven, Reid has never shown any remorse for his attacks on Romney, and in fact on Tuesday showed that he believes the tactics are effective enough to use again on Trump.

Quoting Trump, Reid said that the GOP presidential nominee’s personal wealth fluctuates with the financial markets — which Reid said is cover for a man he said would be “scammer in chief.”

“Simply put, Trump is faking his net worth because he doesn’t want us to know that he’s not a good businessman,” Reid said. “Since 2008, Trump has not donated a single penny to his own charity … does he have money to donate? He says he does, but he doesn’t.”

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. And Republicans aren’t exactly rushing to shield Trump from Reid’s attacks; many, in fact, have said that Trump should release his tax returns in accordance with presidential tradition.

“I’m not going to comment about the presidential race or what our nominee should or should not do,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said Tuesday morning.

Last week, Trump responded to Reid’s months-long string of attacks on him from the Senate floor, telling The Washington Post that Reid should “start working out again with his rubber workout pieces,” a reference to the devastating eye injury Reid sustained while exercising in 2015. Reid then went on a parade of media hits to strike back at Trump last week.

In the interview on Monday, Reid said that because of his injury and his use of a cane, he is “pretty sensitive” to Trump’s mockery of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has a disability.

“He denigrates people who are handicapped. He says that he thinks I should go out and do some more exercise, suggesting that I should blind myself in my other eye,” Reid said. “I don’t think that’s really so good.”

