* Lost in all the chatter about the debate, David Fahrenthold dropped yet another bombshell about the Trump Foundation.
Donald Trump’s charitable foundation has received approximately $2.3 million from companies that owed money to Trump or one of his businesses but were instructed to pay Trump’s tax-exempt foundation instead, according to people familiar with the transactions.
In cases where he diverted his own income to his foundation, tax experts said, Trump would still likely be required to pay taxes on the income. Trump has refused to release his personal tax returns. His campaign said he paid income tax on one of the donations, but did not respond to questions about the others.
* Speaking of Trump’s tax returns, did he just admit last night that he didn’t pay any taxes?
We still do not know what Donald Trump’s tax returns show, because he still has not released them. So it was not unexpected that Hillary Clinton floated multiple theories Monday night for why that might be the case — including the prospect that he had not paid any taxes at all. What was perhaps a bit more unexpected was Trump’s response: He did absolutely nothing to deny it. Just the opposite, in fact.
* Apparently Hillary Clinton noticed. Here is what she said on the campaign trail today:
Speaking to an audience at Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh, North Carolina, the former secretary of state repeated her debate-night claim that Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns may be because he had “paid nothing in federal taxes,” as was true on the few years of his returns that he made public. Trump replied on stage, “That makes me smart.”
“Now, if not paying taxes makes him smart, what does that make all the rest of us?” Clinton asked the crowd.
* In the debate last night, Clinton brought up the abominable way in which Trump treated Alicia Machado, a Venezuelan who won the Miss Universe contest in 1996. He continued his insults this morning on Fox and Friends by saying this:
“I know that person. That person was a Miss Universe person. And she was the worst we ever had, the worst, the absolute worst, she was impossible….She gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem. We had a real problem.
In case you are wondering what “a massive amount of weight” means to Donald Trump:
This is what Alicia Machado looked like when Trump took to publicly & privately humiliating her over her weight. She had just turned 20. pic.twitter.com/jfmMM3jGHW
— Garance Franke-Ruta (@thegarance) September 27, 2016
* This one falls in the category of a picture being worth a thousand words:
* Finally, it’s only Tuesday, but the last 24 hours have been pretty intense for those of us who are political junkies. So let’s lighten up a bit with this clip from the recently reunited cast of “Will and Grace.”
