Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump's campaigns agree on one thing: The potential damage from the revelation in The New York Times that Trump could have avoided paying federal income taxes for 18 years after declaring a $916 million loss in 1995 isn't the taxes part, CBS News' chief White House correspondent Major Garrett explained Monday night. "It's not so much tax fairness, that's a secondary issue," he said. "Both campaigns know the biggest vulnerability exposed by this story was Trump was a crappy businessman in the '90s. And Trump knows that's a big vulnerability if that becomes a cemented attitude about his relationship to business and business acumen."
Trump is trying to argue that the real story is that he was a "tough, stalwart businessman who used every tool imaginable to save his company," including using "creative approaches to the tax code," Garrett said. But that story "will probably not stand up to the test of time or more intense scrutiny." The things Trump "glossed over," he explained, include that "the recession of 1990-91 was one of the most mild of the postwar era," that "it didn't particularly hit the real estate market as much as Trump represented," and that his losses were actually from his almost-bankrupted airline and the "pretty strategic miscalculations" Trump made with his Atlantic City casinos. Watch below. Peter Weber
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