Speaking to ABC News This Week’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, Presidential Counselor Kellyanne Conway responded to a 200,000-signature petition on whitehouse.gov demanding for President Donald Trump to release his tax returns.
“The White House position is that he’s not going to release his tax returns. We litigated this all through the election; people didn’t care. They voted for him,” Conway said. “And let me make this very clear; most Americans are very focused on what their tax returns will look like while President Trump is in office, not what his look like. And you know full well that President Trump and his family are complying with all the ethical rules, everything they need to do to step away from his businesses and be a full-time president.”
This adheres very closely to a line Trump took during his first press conference earlier in January. When asked if he’d be releasing his returns, Trump said he likely would not, saying that people would learn very little from his tax returns and that “only reporters” care about them.
According to a newly-released study from the Pew Research Center, it was found that 60 percent of polled Americans believed Trump did have a responsibility to release his tax returns. However, this is skewed on party lines: 79 percent of Democrats polled on this question answered “yes,” opposed to only 38 percent of Republicans.
In that sense, there is a grain of truthiness to the Trump administration’s “party line:” from their perspective, the people who matter — i.e., the people who voted for them — don’t care about tax returns. Everyone else is irrelevant.