Look, I get why 75% of Americans, according one poll, haven't read any of the Mueller report. Yeah, part of it is that we're now so fucking stupid and so easily distracted that the very idea of sitting down and facing 400 pages of redacted shit with Russian names and banks and more sounds not just intimidating, but, fate of the nation aside, so goddamn dull. The Starr report on Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky had dicks and pussies and cigars in pussies and dicks in mouths. Of course, people wanted to read that. We're animals, after all.
People like things simple and readily graspable. They don't want your nuance. They don't want your multi-level conspiracies that are like jigsaw puzzles where the last piece is lost under the couch and you just can't reach it. They like it cut and dried, man, easily digestible and easily spit out.
Donald fuckin' Trump knew that all the way back in 2011 when he started his batshit crusade against Barack Obama for the crime of being black while president. We all know the birther nonsense, where idiots demanded that Obama produce a birth certificate to prove he was born in Hawaii (and when he did produce one, it wasn't the right one for them). Trump also hopped on the college records bandwagon, too, saying that Obama's university applications and such were big secrets. You can trace the layers and layers of hypocrisy through Trump's Twitter feed, like a mille-feuille of shit.
Like in July 2012, when the dumb orange motherfucker tweeted, "For the sake of transparency, @BarackObama should release all his college applications and transcripts--both from Occidental and Columbia." Or in August of that year, when he implored that Mitt Romney "shouldn't give additional tax returns until @BarackObama gives his passport records, college records & applications."
For the vast majority of us, it was a ludicrous beclowning of the electoral process. But for those who were starting to pay attention to this pathetic reality TV host as a viable candidate and thought, "I like how he sticks it to the Negro," it was fuckin' catnip. And, goddamn, it's so easy to rally behind: Yeah, why won't that Obama prove to us where he came from? (Being racists, they never realized how horribly racist it was.)
Trump even went so far as to say that Obama wouldn't be hiding his records if nothing bad was in them: "Why would @BarackObama be spending millions of dollars to hide his records if there was nothing to hide?" he asked in 2012. He also tweeted on 9/11, our holiest of holy days, "Why won't Obama release his college applications? Is there something 'foreign' about them?"
Obviously, for Donald Trump, refusing to release private information to the public, or, you know, to him, is akin to being guilty. It's right there. The dumb orange motherfucker himself said as much.
So, while they should have been doing this since 2016, Democrats now have a talking point against Trump that is the perfect combination of simple and deadly. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, a man who definitely has had a gerbil or two inserted in his rectum, declined to turn over Trump's federal income tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee, as required by law. This is on top of Trump suing to stop Deutsche Bank from cooperating with congressional investigators, likely because that would involve having his taxes revealed.
The reason that the birther shit had an effect (no, it didn't stop Obama, but it helped Trump's rise), the reason that the Hillary email shit had an effect, the reason why so many aggravatingly simple things have an effect is because they force you to make a decision. Either you want to know about Hillary Clinton's emails or you didn't. And Democrats can use that method to what is inarguably a more noble end: to find out if the President of the United States is a goddamn criminal.
Every fucking day, every opportunity they have, every interview, every speech, Democrats should be demanding that Donald Trump release his taxes. They should be saying that he must have something to hide. It should be the only fucking thing that anyone can think of. They should get people to show up at Republican town halls to ask why the GOP doesn't care about Trump's taxes.
No, you won't get Trump's idiot hordes or his Republican lickspittles and ass remoras to turn against him (although you might succeed in getting a little creeping doubt in there). But you know that 75% who didn't read the Mueller report ain't just Trump-humpers. There are not only a lot of voters who are on the Democrats' side who need a rallying point, but there are those who aren't paying attention at all, who are disengaged, who might just fucking love the clean and clear either/or on Trump's taxes.
So many of us on the left want Democrats to get savage. But there has to be a cohesive message behind the savagery, one that's not complex or needs more than a bumper-sticker to explain. This idea is a damn start. Get people paying attention so that when the impeachment hearings start, they're already on board.
