Category: Movies

UNCONFIRMED REPORT: Marla Maples may have released Donald Trump’s 1995 tax return

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following blog post includes a description of a female individual as an “actor”. The word “actor” is used in a gender-neutral context on this website, although most people use the term “actress” to describe a female actor.

In 2016, the 1990’s have officially come full circle thanks to a recent New York Times report on Donald Trump’s 1995 tax returns.

Trump declared a nearly $916 million loss on his 1995 tax returns. In the mid-1990’s, Trump’s business record included the failure of Trump Airlines and the mismanagement of three Atlantic City, New Jersey casinos. The kind of loss that Trump declared was a net operating loss, and it could have legally allowed Trump to pay zero income taxes from three years prior to the declaration of the loss (1992) to 15 years after the declaration of the loss (2010). In that time frame, Trump earned tens of thousands of dollars per episode of The Apprentice that he hosted, and he also earned roughly $45 million for being the top executive of a publicly-traded company created by Trump to assume ownership of his Atlantic City properties. It’s also worth noting that ordinary investors in Trump’s publicly-traded company had the value of their shares decline to a measly 17ยข from $35.50, many contractors were not paid for work on Trump’s properties, and casino bondholders lost money.

However, as fellow progressive blogger Chris “Capper” Liebenthal likes to say, there’s more…there’s always more!

Jon Lovett, who lists himself as a presidential speechwriter on his Twitter page, has claimed that actor and television personality Marla Maples, who was Trump’s wife at the time the tax return was filed (Trump and Maples divorced in 1999), released Trump’s tax returns:

While this is an unconfirmed report, what is an indisputable fact is that the tax return was a tax return jointly filed by Trump and Maples as a married couple, something that federal law and IRS rules have long permitted. It is possible, but not confirmed, that Maples may have released the tax return to the public.

Why this blog will no longer use the words “actress” and “comedienne”

This paragraph will be the last paragraph of a blog post here on The Progressive Midwesterner in which I use the words “actress” and “comedienne”. From this point forward, a person who plays roles in movies, television shows, and/or plays, regardless of gender, will be referred to as an “actor” (plural: “actors”), and a person who is a practitioner of comedy, regardless of gender, will be referred to as a “comedian” (plural: “comedians”)

There are two reasons for this change:

  1. In a non-scientific poll that I conducted on Twitter, two-thirds of respondents voted for using “actor” as a gender-neutral term (although only six people voted in the poll).
  2. I use words like “hero” as a gender-neutral term, even though there are many people who do not (example here).

As a general rule, with the exception of pronouns, I’m not going to use gender-specific terms to describe someone.