WASHINGTON He says he would be the wealthiest person ever elected president, but refuses to release his income tax records as every major candidate has done for half a century.
He says he’s given tens of millions of dollars to charity, but won’t answer questions about specifics.
He would be the oldest person ever to move into the Oval Office, yet has released no medical records.
On Wednesday, Donald Trump sought to assure American voters that he’s healthy enough to be president by handing television’s “Dr. Oz” a one-page summary from a recent physical. But his refusal to make the full results of the tests or his medical history publicly available underscored his penchant for secrecy, more so than rival Hillary Clinton and a trait that makes him the least transparent presidential candidate in modern times.
“He could have rabies right now and we won’t ever know. We know nothing real about Donald Trump’s health, and going on a celebrity quack TV show does nothing to improve our understanding,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist who has been a leading critic of Trump and thinks he’s withheld more information than any other nominee in modern history.
“That’s a very deliberate choice on Trump’s part.”
When it comes to a lack of transparency, Trump is in “the top 1 percent” of recent presidential candidates, according to Bill Dal Col, a Republican strategist who managed publisher Steve Forbes’ presidential campaigns in 1996 and 2000.
“Hillary Clinton’s being hammered on transparency, but he’s got issues: the taxes, the health records,” Dal Col said. “He should deal with it up front and let voters make up their minds. Release the tax records, the foundation records, the health records. There’s no downside.”
John Weaver, who served as a strategist for Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s failed 2016 presidential bid, said Clinton “has an allergy to transparency” but “she’s Miss Sunlight compared to Mr. Trump.”
Trump has refused to release his tax returns, breaking a tradition that dates to Richard Nixon. He says he can’t release them because he’s being audited by the Internal Revenue Service, which is not true: The IRS says there’s nothing that’s preventing him from making his tax returns public. Clinton has released 30 years of income tax records.
Without Trump’s tax returns, there’s no way to know details – in a legal document – about his income and his deductions, including how much he really gives to charity.
New questions have arisen about Trump’s charitable activities in the wake of a Washington Post investigation of the Donald J. Trump Foundation that shows the foundation is filled with other people’s money.
The foundation is also under scrutiny for a $25,000 donation it made to a political committee backing Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi in 2013. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a Clinton supporter, announced that he’s opened a probe of Trump’s foundation to make sure it hasn’t violated the state’s laws governing nonprofits.
Democratic lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee this week called on the Justice Department to open an investigation into the foundation.
As the controversy surrounding the foundation swirled, Trump was in a Manhattan television studio Wednesday chatting with Dr. Oz about his health.
His campaign had said earlier in the day that he wouldn’t provide details of his recent physical. Trump handed Oz a summary paper from physician Harold Bornstein that gave some information about the candidate’s condition.
Trump, who would be the oldest first-term president if elected, told Oz he wants to shed about 15 pounds, CNN reported. He told Oz he takes statins for cholesterol and eats fast food largely because restaurant chains offer consistency during his frequent travels, Politico reported.
He claimed to get exercise by playing golf and working up a sweat delivering political speeches, according to Politico.
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Wilson said it was “deeply ironic” and “troubling” that Republicans who were up in arms in 2008 over what they said was a lack of details about Barack Obama were mostly silent when it came to Trump.
“All these questions that were vital in 2008, now it’s Trump it’s like ‘No worries, it’s cool,’ ” he said.
Even what Trump handed to Dr. Oz on Wednesday pales in comparison with what Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., offered when he ran for president in 2008 at an age similar to Trump’s.
McCain allowed reporters to review 1,173 pages of medical records – including handwritten notes from his doctors, including the attending physician of Congress – along with lab results, clinical notes, pathology reports, insurance documents, doctor’s orders and anesthesia reports. Those papers were released in addition to the 1,500 pages McCain had released the previous time he ran for president.
McCain said it was up to Trump and Clinton to decide how much medical information they wanted to reveal.
“We made the decision that we made in my campaign, there were obviously some circumstances that argued for it because of my injuries in Vietnam,” McCain told McClatchy. “We went through a long process when we decided what we would do with mine. I understood it in my case because my opponents made it, obviously in their view, a very important issue. But every race is different.”
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