| Slightly more than four years ago, USA TODAY pondered whether there would be an October surprise in the 2012 election - a major revelation that would sink a candidate's chances at the White House. As the calendar turns to October, we have the first two nominees for this year's game-changer already in, along with hints of more on the way. |
| Deep in the heart of taxes |
| If there was a surprise in 2012, it was the release of a secret recording in mid-September where Mitt Romney told backers that 47% of the country doesn't pay any income tax, and therefore would never vote Republican. Funny story: The very next Republican presidential nominee may have been among that 47%. The New York Times reported on Saturday that, based on 1995 tax documents sent to the newspaper, Trump had losses of more than $900 million in a single year, which could have allowed him to have legally avoided paying federal taxes for up to 18 years. |
| It's that "legally" part that Team Trump drove home in his defense Sunday. Trump himself tweeted , "I know our complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president and am the only one who can fix them." In other words, only someone who's beaten the system can fix it, like sending Sean Connery's character to break into Alcatraz in "The Rock." Rudy Giuliani told ABC's This Week, "He's a genius at how to take advantage of legal remedies that can help your company survive and grow." New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told Fox News Sunday, "No apologies for complying with the law." What remains to be seen is if voters care more about the legality - or the ethics - of a billionaire developer paying nothing in income taxes. |
| Is this the end of the story? Maybe not. Federal law prohibits the release of federal tax documents, but all the New York Times reported on this weekend were three state documents: Trump's New York taxes and nonresident income taxes for New Jersey and Connecticut. The reporter who broke the story, Susanne Craig, said "no comment" when asked if there were more documents, and NYT Executive Editor Dean Baquet has said in the past that, laws be damned, he'd risk jail time to publish Trump's tax returns. |
| Surprises for everyone |
| Don't worry, Hillary, you didn't get left out. On Friday, the Washington Free Beacon released audio recorded at a Hillary Clinton fundraiser earlier this year in Virginia at which Clinton referred to Bernie Sanders' supporters as "new to politics completely" and "living in their parents' basement," which made #BasementDwellers a trending topic through the weekend. So how did Hillary propose to reach these basement dwellers (apart from the obvious: mildew treatment message boards)? "(T)ake what we can achieve now and try to present them as bigger goals." |
| What did new Clinton surrogate Bernie Sanders say about all this? Basically: yeah, they totally live in basements. "There are young people who went deeply into debt, worked very hard to get a good education, and yet they are getting out of school and they can't find decent-paying jobs," Sanders told Jake Tapper on CNN's State of the Union. "And that's a major problem. They are living in their parents' basements. And that's the point there." |
| As for what happens next? Wikileaks had promised a new Clinton-related hacked document release this Wednesday, prompting Trump supporter Roger Stone to tweet that "@HillaryClinton is done." After some schedule changes, it looks like the release will coincide now with a video press conference by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange Tuesday morning in Berlin. |
| Odds that our presidents streaked campus: high |
| Clinton got her political science undergrad degree at Wellesley College and her JD from Yale. Trump started his college career at Fordham before transferring to Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania. Is it weird to have Ivy League grads dominate the political scene? Not really, says a breakdown by trade-schools.net . Eleven of our 43 presidents had Ivy League credentials, as well as 8% of Congress, with Harvard University as the top school in both categories. |
| On the other end of the postgraduate scale, 12 of 43 presidents had no college education (including Grover Cleveland, who we refuse to count twice). But you'd have to go back to Harry Truman in the middle of last century to find a president without a degree. |
| Random: The football team for one of Hillary Clinton's alma maters (Yale) plays both of Donald Trump's alma maters this month (Fordham on Oct. 15, Penn on Oct. 21). We tried for hours to figure out if a gridiron victory had any election-prediction power, but the entire thing is a mess of Ivy League undergrad degrees and postgraduate degrees. So we're going to go with: no, football has nothing to do with the Electoral College. |
| More from the campaign trail |
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| Elsewhere, fans wished Lester Holt good luck in the playoffs |
| Chicago Cubs pitcher Jon Lester spent at least part of his Thursday responding to tweets complaining about Lester Holt's efforts as debate moderator. |
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