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How The Internet Reacted To The Release Of Trump's Tax Returns

Photo: Jim Lo Scalzo/Pool/Bloomberg.
U.S. President Donald Trump pauses while speaking during a joint session of Congress in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2017.
On Tuesday night, Rachel Maddow dropped a bombshell on her Twitter account: She had obtained a copy of President Trump's tax returns and would be talking about them at 9 p.m. ET during The Rachel Maddow Show.
For months throughout the campaign and the first weeks of the Trump administration, journalists everywhere had unsuccessfully tried to obtain a copy of the president's tax returns. After all, he was the first Republican candidate and the first president that refused to release his returns since President Richard Nixon in the 1970s. This raised a whole lot of questions about his finances and his business relationships. (Specially when it came to his possible links to Russia.)
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Throughout the whole ordeal, Trump had been adamant that he wouldn't release these documents, saying he couldn't do so because he was undergoing a federal audit. Still, 60% of Americans believed he had a responsibility to make his returns available to the public.
So naturally, when Maddow announced her program had obtained a copy of Trump's tax returns Twitter users went bonkers. Who cares if they were from 2005! Was this real? After all the months pushing for the Trump campaign and the Trump administration to release POTUS 45's tax returns, was this finally happening?
But once the show started, Maddow took her sweet time teasing viewers. As her monologue kept getting longer and longer, people started to get angsty. When the hell would she show the documents?
By the time the big reveal finally happened, she showed only two pages of his federal tax return 1040 form. People were understandably underwhelmed and a bit disappointed. Was this all she had?
The answer is yes. There wasn't much there. But in the end, Maddow's effort proved something important: Nothing is really stopping the Trump administration from releasing the president's tax returns. Or even journalists from digging further. Now the question is, will they?
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