Last Week Tonight host John Oliver has emerged as one of the leading anti-Donald Trump personalities in the entire media landscape, with his biting critiques often shared, discussed, and debated in the mainstream press. But according to a Wednesday report in the Observer, the late-night funnyman used a tax loophole created in part by Trump in the 1970s to allegedly avoid paying a large tax bill on the $9.5 million New York City apartment he purchased in 2014, weeks before deriding tax breaks for the wealthy during a segment on his HBO show.
The Observer’s Ken Silverstein reports:
Donald Trump is wildly unpopular with coastal elites, but few despise him as feverishly as the Hollywood Brigades, led by Meryl Streep, and the late night comedian squadrons, headed by The Tonight Show’s Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah, and Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver.
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The hypocrisy really gets ratcheted up with John Oliver, the No. 1 darling to so many liberal anti-Trumpies, who regularly attacks GOP tax schemes as giveaways to the rich and detrimental to the poor. (Again, that’s an apt description, but they evinced less rage about Obama’s economic and tax policies, which also funneled money upward to an extreme degree.)
For years, Oliver has criticized the estate tax, which defenders, in a smart linguistic move dreamed up by Frank Luntz, long ago labeled the “death tax”; and the tax code’s raft of loopholes that benefit special interests he identified as oil companies and hedge fund managers. Oliver even briefly established the bogus Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption to draw attention to tax-exempt status granted to churches and charities.
Back in July 2014, in an episode in which he lamented the Wealth Gap in America” (which has resulted in the richest one percent of Americans controlling 20 percent of annual income), Oliver said, “At this point the rich are just running up the score…What sets America apart is that we are actively introducing policies that disproportionately benefit the wealthy,” such as tax cuts and loopholes like trusts.
So it’s a little surprising to discover that just months before, Oliver had a tax attorney set up two revocable trusts, one for him and one for his wife, to hide the couple’s purchase of a $9.5 million Manhattan penthouse. Then he used a tax loophole created by Donald Trump himself back in the 1970s, when the current president was merely a prominent New York real estate developer and aspiring celebrity author.
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Read Silverstein’s full report at the Observer.
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