opinion

We need a movement to demand Trump's tax returns

Donald Trump has a singular power to hijack minds — a gift the left needs to counter and, perhaps, adopt for its own ends.

Trump's career as a conservative politician took off when he demanded Barack Obama’s birth certificate, a document we’d already seen. The absurd demand captured a powerful sentiment lurking in the bowels of the right: a black man named Barack Obama could not be a legitimate president.

Trump knows his audience, because he is his audience — aging, white, with plenty of free “executive time” in the mornings, afternoons, evenings, late evenings and pre-dawn hours.

For years, liberals laughed about a study that suggested the Fox News audience is less informed than people who watch no news at all. One of those viewers is now president.

Thus it’s easy to suggest Trump is bumbling his way through his semi-retirement, because he is. But he has an unmatched talent — distraction. That skill has spun him out of series of bankruptcies and a snowball of humiliations into the most powerful person on the planet.

Distraction allowed Trump to get through most of his campaign without demonstrating basic knowledge of policy or American governance. It allowed him to sidestep his birther claims until weeks before the election. And distraction from his allies even helped dull the impact of the "Access Hollywood" tape as Wikileaks began releasing hacked emails from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta hours after the repulsive audio went public.

Trump may not play 11-dimensional chess or even two-dimensional checkers. But he isn’t playing beanbag either.

You don’t have to believe Trump knows what he wants to focus on next, to accept that he has a remarkable ability to get us talking about whatever he wants us to think about right now.

“Trump keeps proving that if you simply refuse to be ashamed of your corruption and lying, there’s not much the media can do to you, and the conversation eventually moves on,” Vox’s Ezra Klein tweeted. “It’s a real weakness in the system, at least while the opposition party is powerless.”

Mocking Trump on Trump’s terms lets him establish the confines of our debate. For instance, instead of debating his corruption, people are discussing his “stable genius” tweet with various degrees of sincerity.

If mocking Trump could stop him, he would have spontaneously combusted in the ‘80s when Spy Magazine labeled him a “short-fingered vulgarian” and one of “America's cheapest zillionaires” (there were two) after he cashed a 13-cent check the magazine sent him.

So instead of mocking Trump, let’s beat him at his own distraction con.

Liberals need their own birtheresque movement that crystallizes what Americans fear most about the least popular new president in the history of polling. By happy coincidence, there’s a document Trump’s America needs to see now — his tax returns.

“Without peeking under the veil of Trump's actual holdings and wealth, we cannot know what is Trump's vision for America and what is Trump's vision for the Trump Organization,” Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, told me.

Call these new crusaders "worthers." Their movement would lack the opportunistic xenophobia and racism of Trump’s birtherism and most of his policies, so it wouldn’t be able to match his sensationalism. But what wortherism lacks in furor, it makes up for in function.

Trump has promised to deliver these forms over and over for seven years. Many Americans have a feeling that Trump’s only goal is to monetize the presidency like it's going out of business. The basic disclosure that has been offered by every president since Richard Nixon is the evidence that could prove or disprove it.

For instance, much of tax break did Trump just give himself? Reports suggest that it’s $11 million a year, compared with the chump change many American families will get. And we still have no idea about the dealings of his for-profit businesses, which he spends one-third of his time as president promoting. We know very little, for example, about who is buying his real estate and what they might want from him.

The press has done an abysmal job of calling out Trump on his promises to disclose his tax returns and will likely continue to fail. Reporters don’t want to make their own demands the story, and Trump’s antics are far more profitable.

To make Trump's returns a national concern, we need a genuine celebrity, because an actual politician won’t be distracting enough. And this celebrity must be willing to risk the ire of the most powerful and petulant man in the world in a way that grabs his and the nation’s attention.

“Oprah should offer to open up her books and say her money, all self-earned, is bigger than his (inherited) wealth!” Hauser suggested.

This would be an immense public service even if Oprah doesn’t care about seeking the presidency. It could possibly even make up a bit for her having foisted Dr. Phil on us.

But she’d better have her birth certificate ready.

Jason Sattler, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, is a columnist for The National Memo.