Trump Played Populist 'Con' On The 'Rubes,' Says Former Republican Official

Self-proclaimed billionaire Donald Trump’s astonishingly low federal income tax payments shut down his “economic populism con” that faked out the “rubes” who supported him, declared a former spokesperson for the Republican National Committee.

“While he was living a life of luxury that most Americans can only dream of, he was racked with massive debts and paying no income tax thanks to business write-offs on flamboyant haircuts, consulting fees paid to his daughter, and a summer retreat where his large adult sons liked to ride ATVs and laugh at the poor suckers who had to mow the lawn,” Tim Miller, deputy communications director for the RNC in 2012 and 2013, wrote Monday on the conservative news website The Bulwark.

Miller was reacting to a New York Times report on Sunday that said Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and again in 2017. In 10 of the previous 15 years, he paid none at all, according to the Times, which analyzed several years of Trump’s tax returns.

“Trump was not the brilliant businessman skilled at tax write-offs that we had been promised. He was a fraud who was paying nothing at all. Literally,” Miller noted.

Yet, during his last campaign, Trump purported to be a champion of Middle America and vowed to raise taxes on the wealthy because the “middle class is getting clobbered.” Trump said he “wouldn’t mind paying” more taxes, which no one realized at the time would have been right next to nothing.

But there “was no economic populist agenda” after he was elected, Miller pointed out.

Instead, the tax bill Trump signed into law was a “boon to the wealthy” while he “billed the American people for millions upon millions of their hard-earned tax dollars” for golf holidays at his own resorts, Miller said.

Trump’s campaign promises were nothing more than “a story for the rubes,” added Miller, who is currently the political director of Republican Voters Against Trump.

The only “populist” action of the Trump era has been unleashing “cultural grievance” — using his bully pulpit to take down those “uppity athletes ... shutting the door on new immigrants and refugees” and using “racial slurs without getting ‘canceled,’” he wrote.

Miller concluded: It’s the “same old racist, nativist nonsense wrapped in a phony soak-the-rich package.”

Check out the entire piece in The Bulwark here.

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.