Trump Tries to Make Taibbi’s IRS Visit About Himself: ‘The Price You Pay for Being Honest in the USA’
Donald Trump posted a video on his social media platform ranting about the IRS on Thursday, invoking Matt Taibbi to start it off but moving on immediately to himself.
Trump shared a link and quote from a Wall Street Journal article along with his clip in a Truth Social post Thursday afternoon.
In the video, he started out with the WSJ headline and called the actions of the IRS “brazen and somewhat stupid.”
“So interesting to see the IRS make a Strange House Call — that was the title of the article by the Wall Street Journal on Matt Taibbi — during his House testimony on Twitter and all of the bad things that the government has done,” Trump began. “That is not a coincidence. It’s just plain brazen and somewhat stupid.”
Taibbi is one of the journalists who published Twitter Files posts, a collection of past Twitter documents and communications which suggest users were censored before Elon Musk took ownership.
“An agent shows up at the home of the Twitter files journalist who testified before Congress,” the WSJ wrote in the March 27 article. It goes on to talk about “new evidence that the Internal Revenue Service may be targeting a journalist who testified before the weaponization committee.”
Trump then quickly turned the spotlight on himself.
“But even more brazen and stupid is the way they have handled me, leaking information, which is totally illegal, and making a deal and then breaking it for strictly political reasons,” Trump said. “I had a done deal before running for president. They broke it. They treated me worse than they treated the Tea Party or the evangelicals. I could have easily made a very good deal with the IRS during my four years as president, but I thought it would be inappropriate to do so. Maybe a conflict of interest. I didn’t want that.”
Trump has an interesting history with the IRS. He refused to release his tax returns as he ran for president in 2016, saying he couldn’t because he was “under audit.” In 2022, the House Ways and Means Committee released documents that showed Trump paid $0 in federal income taxes in 2020.
Trump did not go into specifics about the “deal” he should have made.
“Besides, I already had a deal from before my presidency,” he said. “A deal which they chose not to honor. So now I’m demanding the original deal without late changes in the rules and regulations. So that deal would be harder to make.”
Trump then accused President Joe Biden of taking “advantage of government.”
“Most people would say that after watching the Biden family take advantage of government, I should have made a deal during my term. To me, it was a conflict. I thought it was inappropriate, so I didn’t do so. But this is the price you pay for being honest in the USA of today.”
Watch the clip above, via Truth Social.
