Trump Wants You to Cheat on Your Taxes

“There’s seemingly this mentality building,” Carolyn Schenck, a former national fraud counsel for the IRS, tells The Wall Street Journal’s Richard Rubin. The mentality, Shenck says, is “the IRS isn’t going to catch me.” It isn’t that people are getting more corrupt. It’s that the president of the United States is inviting them not to pay.

I know that sounds harsh, but consider all the various ways Trump has told Mr. and Mrs. America that he doesn’t want their tax dollars.

In his second inaugural address, Trump spoke of replacing the progressive income tax with tariffs on foreign imports. “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries,” Trump said, “we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.” Never mind that foreign countries don’t pay tariffs; U.S. consumers do. The point is that Trump thinks we can return to the days before 1913 when a much smaller federal government didn’t bother with an income tax, funding the government instead mostly with tariffs.

Even before the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s blatantly illegal Liberation Day tariffs (the U.S. Court of International Trade is now contemplating whether also to strike down the temporary tariffs with which Trump replaced them), Trump’s arithmetic never added up. In the current fiscal year, the income tax accounts for 50 percent of all federal revenues. That excludes payroll taxes, which constitute another 35 percent of all federal revenues. By comparison, “customs duties” (i.e., tariffs) account for only about 7 percent of all federal revenues. Neither the Supreme Court ruling nor this unforgiving calculation from Trump’s own Treasury Department discouraged Trump from saying in this year’s State of the Union address, “I believe the tariffs, paid for by foreign countries, will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love.”

Another way Trump has told Americans not to pay their taxes was through his One Big Beautiful reconciliation bill, which cut taxes by $4.5 trillion over 10 years. In this instance, it was mostly rich people whose money Trump refused, because most of that $4.5 billion tax cut went to them. According to the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the average family earning less than $50,000 will next year get about $250 in tax cuts while the average filer earning more than $1 million will get more than $100,000 in tax cuts. Add in spending cuts to Medicaid, Obamacare, and food stamps, and the bill represents a net loss for lower-income families.

To be fair, though, Trump didn’t especially want non-rich people’s money, either. That was demonstrated by his administration’s elimination of Direct File, a vastly popular pilot program created under President Joe Biden to help people with uncomplicated tax returns file their taxes. Direct File was opposed by the tax-prep industry and its Republican friends in Congress, who believe it’s the federal government’s patriotic duty to make income tax filing sufficiently difficult that it can never be done without hiring a private-sector middleman. If that discourages some people from filing at all, so be it.

Which brings us to the main way Trump shows he doesn’t want your tax dollars: He’s making it easier to cheat. This is in accordance with a long-standing Republican policy to deprive the IRS of sufficient funds to catch rich tax cheats. Biden bucked this by adding $80 billion to IRS enforcement, but a series of congressional rescissions spearheaded by Republicans yanked nearly all of that funding back.

Today, funding for IRS enforcement is, after inflation, lower than it’s been since 1988, and the Trump administration recently proposed cutting it another 18 percent. As Rubin points out in the Journal, even the Trump IRS’s own budget report for fiscal year 2027 concedes that reducing enforcement spending increases the budget deficit because the revenue such enforcement generates exceeds the cost of paying bureaucrats to do the enforcing. But it’s not about the money. It’s about pandering to tax cheats. As one tax lawyer told Rubin: “They have defunded the police.”

Should the IRS, against all odds, successfully prosecute a tax cheat, the perp can still take comfort in the fact that Trump hands out pardons and reduced sentences to tax offenders like so much penny candy. I count nine such commutations during the 15 months Trump has been back in the White House. There’s the TV reality-show stars Julie and Todd Chrisley (“tax evasion”); the baseball player Darryl Strawberry (“tax evasion”); former Republican Representative Michael Gerard Grimm (“preparation of false and fraudulent tax returns”); former Republican Arkansas state senator—also son to former Republican Senator Tim Hutchinson and nephew to former Republican Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson—Jeremy Young Hutchinson (“aiding and abetting filing of false income tax return”); Trump $900 million political donor Imaad Shah Zuberi (“tax evasion”); Paul Walczak, a former nursing home executive who got the nod less than three weeks after his mother attended a $1 million-per-seat Trump fundraiser (“willful failure to pay trust fund taxes; failure to file return/information”); Joseph Schwartz, another nursing home executive (“willful failure to pay over employment taxes”); and investment broker Marian I. Morgan (“making false statements on income tax returns”).

Trump’s affinity for tax frauds may be grounded in personal experience, since Trump’s own business has been busted for criminal tax fraud. Or maybe the relatability has to do with Trump’s personal reluctance ever to pay taxes, as documented by The New York Times in September 2020. In 2016, the Times reported that the year he first won the White House, Trump paid $750 in federal income tax. In 2017, his first year in office, he also paid $750, and in 10 of the previous 15 years he paid nothing at all.

Trump’s response to the Times’ article was to sue the IRS for $10 billion for failing to prevent his returns from being leaked. (Never mind that the leaker was already serving a five-year sentence.) This failure occurred while Trump was president the first time, so apparently Trump doesn’t believe, as Harry Truman did, that the buck stops on his Oval Office desk. For Trump, the buck stops in his wallet.

The lawsuit was filed while Trump was president the second time, which puts Trump on both sides of this conflict. In March, Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer reported in The New York Times that the Justice Department was hoping to resolve by mid-April what to do. One significant obstacle was that if the department were to defend the IRS against Trump’s claim, that would put it in violation of an executive order binding government lawyers to Trump’s interpretation of the law, no matter how cockeyed.

In ordinary times, the White House informs the public every April what the president of the United States paid in taxes. It’s hard to imagine Trump will pay no taxes this year, because his net worth increased by an estimated $3 billion in 2025, much of that on the basis of a stake in World Liberty Financial for which Trump appears to have paid not a penny. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine Trump will pay very much, because he really hates that. I feel comfortable opining that Trump likely cheated on this year’s taxes, and that whatever he paid was likely less than what you paid, or me. If true, that would be yet another inducement—one I strongly advise against taking—not to pay all you owe.