His appetite for Hillary Clinton's bait apparently not sated by his smorgasbord Monday night, Donald Trump kept right on taking it Tuesday morning. She closed their debate with a scorching assault on his attitude toward women, recounting ugly things he has said and specifically mentioning Alicia Machado, a Miss Universe that Trump had referred to as "Miss Piggy" and "Miss Housekeeping" (because, you know, Latina).

Trump's Monday night response was a weird disquisition in which he said that he had some really, really mean things to say about Clinton's family but decided not to. But Tuesday morning he was back to gulping down the bait with great gusto. "[S]he gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem," the GOP nominee told the hosts of "Fox and Friends," referring to Machado, having retreated to that friendly territory to complain. "We had a real problem."

He does have a real problem, and The Washington Post's Jenna Johnson ably summed it up on Twitter Tuesday morning:

Some unsolicited advice for Donald Trump: If you want to win over female voters, you really shouldn't attack a woman for gaining weight. — Jenna Johnson (@wpjenna) September 27, 2016

The only thing to add would be that the same general advice applies when trying to win over Hispanic voters. (In case you've been residing under a rock for lo these many months, Donald Trump's poll numbers with women and Hispanics are, to use a term of art, deplorable.)

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But maybe Trump is being clever like a fox here. Maybe he's dashing down that particular dead-end path so as to avoid a potentially even more damaging one: the question of his taxes, and whether he pays any. (No, not seriously – he's not that smart; but the political calculus still holds.)

Because any time we spend talking about Alicia Machado – and, to be clear, discussing her does nothing but hurt him – is time we're not pondering his seeming confirmation Monday night that he doesn't actually pay any income taxes. During the debate, Clinton laid out a litany of speculation about why he refuses to release his tax returns, concluding that perhaps "they showed he didn't pay any federal income tax." Trump's retort? "That makes me smart." Later when she repeated the suggestion that he hadn't paid anything in income tax, he added, "It would be squandered too, believe me."

Note that's would have been, as in: Didn't happen but if it had... He tried to walk it back afterward, telling CNN's Jim Acosta, "Of course I've paid federal taxes." But that's not quite the same thing as saying that he's paid income taxes. As Clinton pointed out during the debate, the public record shows that there have been years when he's paid none; and in the spin room afterward he evaded when NBC News' Katy Tur asked him the specific question and campaign spokesman Jason Miller refused to answer as well. Per Slate's Jim Newell:

Q: You've said he pays taxes. Does he pay federal income taxes?

Miller: You'll see everything when he comes forward and the routine audit's completed.

Q: You can't say whether or not he pays federal income taxes at this point.

Miller: Of course he pays taxes.

Q: You did not say federal income taxes.

Q: Does he definitively pay federal income taxes and has he done so every year?

Miller: Mr. Trump pays considerable taxes, of course he pays federal taxes, and we'll see that when it comes out.

Q: Has he paid federal income taxes over the last 20 years?

Miller: Of course Mr. Trump has paid tremendous amounts of taxes, and we'll see that when it comes forward.

Q: So that's not a yes or a no?

Miller: He's paid taxes at every level.

This is a big deal, arguably a bigger deal than his continuing to insult women and Hispanics, and in the person of Alicia Machado, both – he's already dug that hole especially deep, after all. But he's styled himself as a champion of the white, working stiff (excepting those who he has, you know, stiffed). That's the core of his support, but some of those voters might waver if they find out that the self-proclaimed multibillionaire (who smarmily said of his rooting in 2006 for the real estate collapse, "That's called business, by the way") hasn't been shouldering his fair share of the burden.

Given his debate responses and his campaign's subsequent hypertechnical claim that he's paid taxes of some sort, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that he has largely avoided paying federal income taxes.

This only adds salience to the issue of his releasing his income tax returns. Reporters should raise this issue at every opportunity (not many these days, as his only media appearances seem to be on Fox, and he hasn't given a press conference in weeks) because he's way outside the norms of routine disclosure and this is an area where transparency is an obligation; Democrats should hammer the further question of whether he's paid anything at all because it would put the lie again to his pose as blue collar hero.