Opinion by Richard Galant
"My parents didn't want to move to Florida," Jerry Seinfeld used to say in his standup routines, "but they're in their sixties, and that's the law."
The joke resonated with audiences in New York, where there has been a decades-long migration of older residents to the Sunshine State in search of warmer weather and lower taxes. Now, at 73, President Donald Trump is going too.
Trump's legal change of residence from New York to Florida was reported by the New York Times Thursday. Trump's move may well reduce his tax liability but reporting on his tax returns has suggested he has been very successful at avoiding them even while living in a high-tax state.
"Trump's legal move to Florida may indeed be about taxes, as Trump himself suggests, but just not about paying taxes, which Trump doesn't do. Instead, the move seems inspired by attempts to disclose Trump's taxes, which the President also very much does not like to do," observed Edward McCaffery.
"New York has been aggressive on the front of trying to shed light on Trump's taxes: The state legislature passed a law facilitating Congress's access to Trump's state-level returns, and the Manhattan district attorney, Cy Vance, has been pressing the case for access to Trump's returns in court." But Florida's Republican state officials will likely take a different stance, McCaffery noted. "In Florida, Trump can work on his tan while not worrying about any tax forms being disclosed to anyone."
Errol Louis wrote, "We may not know Trump's precise Florida-vs-New York tax math, but the political math behind relocating is crystal clear...Trump clearly hopes to carry Florida's 29 electoral votes again to win re-election -- he kicked off his 2020 campaign with a rally in Orlando -- but he knows that it's still a true swing state, going to Republican President George Bush twice (in 2000 and 2004), then swinging back to Democratic President Barack Obama (in 2008 and 2012)."
The move has the added benefit for Trump of distance from a state and city whose politicians are particularly opposed to the President. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been a fierce critic, Rep. Jerry Nadler heads up the House Judiciary Committee, which is part of the impeachment process, and Chuck Schumer leads the Democrats in the US Senate.
Impeachment game on
As the House voted to officially launch an impeachment inquiry, the divide between liberal and conservative commentators last week could not have been any starker.
Joe Lockhart, a Democrat who served in the White House during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, credited House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with a smart strategy and suggested that upcoming public hearings on impeachment are likely to be persuasive: "By having staff counsel lead the questioning, Democrats have a very good chance of methodically telling the story of why the President should be impeached." By contrast, he wrote, "The White House does not appear to have a strategy at all. The President has tweeted his way through the last few weeks looking desperate and angry, flitting from one defense to another." He gave Pelosi and the Democrats an A, House Republicans a B minus and Trump an F on strategy.
Republican Scott Jennings completely disagreed. The House will impeach and the Senate won't remove Trump, he predicted. "There will be nothing to show for it but wasted time and a diversion of the nation's political conversation away from issues that real people care about," he lamented.
"Let's be honest. The Democrats were always going to do this. From the minute we realized on election night that Donald Trump had won, they began fantasizing about nullifying the election results."
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