Clinton tears into Trump on taxes; he says he’ll save nation

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.

At another rally hours later in Loveland, Colorado, he returned to the argument, racing through his tax explanation as if it were already part of his usual rally rhetoric and drawing cheers from the packed arena crowd. But moments earlier, he complained about the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, repairs to which could potentially be funded by taxes Trump may not have paid.

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.

Trump’s campaign is searching for a way to rattle Clinton — while also getting control of its own message. The new revelations only make that harder. While the incomplete tax records published by the Times show no irregularities, the size of Trump’s loss cuts at a core tenet of his presidential bid — his remarkable business success. Meanwhile, his boorish comments are threatening to turn away female voters.

Trump was more disciplined Monday both in Pueblo and at a forum in Virginia hosted by the Retired American Warriors PAC.

Seizing an opportunity he missed on the debate stage last week, Trump went after Clinton’s commitment to fighting cybersecurity threats and pointed to her use of a private, email server when she served as secretary of state.

He said Clinton’s handling of classified emails on the server makes her “totally unfit” for the Oval Office.

But Trump’s taxes dominated the conversation.

In a story published over the weekend, the Times said it received the first pages of Trump’s 1995 state income tax filings in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut from an anonymous person. The filings showed a net loss of $915,729,293 in federal taxable income for the year — losses of a magnitude that they might have allowed Trump to avoid paying taxes for years.

His campaign said that he had paid “hundreds of millions” of dollars in other kinds of taxes over the years.

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Lemire reported from Pueblo, Colorado. AP writers Kathleen Hennessey, Laurie Kellman and Jeff Horwitz in Washington and Ken Thomas in Charlotte, North Carolina, contributed.

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Reach Thomas on Twitter at http://twitter.com/@KThomasDC and Lemire at http://twitter.com/@JonLemire

Ken Thomas And Jonathan Lemire, The Associated Press

by Canadian Press

Clinton tears into Trump on taxes; he says he’ll save nation

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