Why the Leak of Trump’s Taxes Matters

David Frum: “First, it melts Trump’s support a little more. Trump’s hopes for 2020 depended on fantastic overperformance with white voters without college degrees. He’s lost so much support elsewhere that he must hold every last member of his core group. He doesn’t need to decline much among these voters to convert any faint hope of success into certainty of disaster.”

“Second, and perhaps more important, the ink-on-paper confirmation of Trump’s indebtedness, tax dodging, and all-around crookedness will get into Trump’s head. His political project through the pandemic has been to mess with his opponents by hurling one crazy distraction after another. Now, suddenly, it’s his own decision loop that has been disrupted. On the preexisting trajectory of the 2020 campaign, Trump was going to lose—and probably lose big. He needed something to happen either to help him or, more plausibly, to push the Biden camp into some mistake or misstep. Now the banana peels have been dumped beneath his own feet.”