Big day today. As I write this President Zelensky is either somewhere over the Atlantic or close to arriving in Washington already, I understand. I’m sure he realizes that once Republicans take the majority in the House, military aid from the U.S. will likely dry up. But he will address Congress and do his best to open right-wing eyes.

And yesterday we pretty much got the Holy Grail, also known as Trump’s taxes. They’ll be released as soon as some personal information like people’s Social Security numbers have been redacted. But what’s come out so far is that the IRS failed to do its duty to audit Trump’s taxes while he was in office (yet chose to do “deep audits” of Andrew McCabe and James Comey). Further, it appears Trump made all kinds of claims of deductions and write-offs and losses and values without providing any documentation. One suspects he just pulled numbers out of his ass.

Susanne Craig of the New York Times commented yesterday,

I’ve long felt Donald Trump didn’t want his tax return information released because it exposes him as a wildly unsuccessful businessman. In 2019, we obtained a printout of Trump’s official Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts from 1985 to 1994, when Trump lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer. That’s right — more money than any other individual in the country. We were able to establish this by comparing his results for those years with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners.

And one suspects he’s been fudging numbers on his tax returns for years to keep himself financially afloat. A real audit could ruin him. Anyone got popcorn?

And the January 6 committee’s final report is supposed to be released today. Possibly the best news is that we learned yesterday that the committee had already been cooperating with and sending documents to special prosecutor Jack Smith.

Enjoy the moment. I’m not hearing any reports on how Trump is handling all this, but here is a good guess.