TOLEDO, Ohio — Hillary Clinton tore into Donald Trump’s tax manoeuvring, business skills and trustworthiness Monday as she sought to capitalize on news that the New York real estate mogul may have paid no federal taxes for years. Unfazed, he boasted of using U.S. tax laws “brilliantly” and cast himself as a savvy business survivor poised to save a reeling nation.
Campaigning at a Toledo train station, Clinton castigated Trump as a cold-hearted and bungling businessman who “represents the same rigged system that he claims he’s going to change.” She called for a new law requiring presidential candidates from major parties to release their tax returns, as Trump has refused to do, and she accused him of shirking his responsibility as a taxpayer.
“He’s taken corporate excess and made a business model out of it,” she said. “It’s Trump first and everyone else last.”
The Democrat’s broadside was her first response to a weekend New York Times report that Trump claimed a loss of nearly $916 million in a single year on his personal tax filings. The Times said the size of the loss could have allowed him to avoid federal taxes for nearly two decades, an assertion his campaign neither confirmed nor disputed.
Nor did Trump.
Instead, at a Colorado rally, he portrayed himself as a man who bounced back from financial losses, will recover from a currently difficult stretch of the campaign and propel the nation to a similar turnaround.
“On Nov. 8, America’s comeback begins,” he told cheering supporters in Pueblo.
As for questions about his tax history, Trump said he had “brilliantly used those laws … legally used the tax laws to my benefit and to the benefit of my company, my investors and my employees.”
“The unfairness of the tax laws is unbelievable. It’s something I’ve been talking about for a long time, despite, frankly, being a big beneficiary of the laws,” Trump told the crowd in Pueblo. “But I’m working for you now. I’m not working for Trump.”
He acknowledged business failures as well as successes but declared, “I’m still here.”
He said that “our country is in need of a major comeback,” just like the one he was able to pull off after near-financial collapse in the 1990s — and the one, he implied, he would make from his recent drop in the polls after a difficult campaign week.
Several of Trump’s surrogates also rallied to note that the Times report did not allege wrongdoing and they contended the Republican presidential candidate was a “genius” for using the tax system to rebuild his fortune.
At the same time, the Clinton campaign seized on the comment with a new TV ad, asking, “If not paying taxes makes him smart, what does that make the rest of us?”
In her remarks in Ohio, Clinton mocked: “What kind of genius loses a billion dollars in a single year?”
Other Trump troubles mounted.
Former cast and crew members from the reality TV show “The Apprentice” described for the first time his treatment of women on the set. Show insiders told The Associated Press that Trump rated female contestants by the size of their breasts and talked about which ones he’d like to have sex with.
The campaign issued a broad denial, calling the claims “totally false.”
Also Monday, the New York attorney general’s office ordered the Trump Foundation to immediately stop fundraising in the state, saying it isn’t registered to do so.
The back-to-back bad news piled on a week of Trump missteps and his increasingly aggressive personal attacks on Clinton. Since a rocky debate last week, Trump has engaged in a distracting feud with a former beauty queen he called “Miss Piggy” because she gained weight during her reign. He seemed to try to shift the conversation Saturday night when he suggested, without evidence, that Clinton may have cheated on her husband.