[WATCH] Thousands march to demand Trump release tax returns

Tens of thousands of people marched through Manhattan and several other US cities on Saturday to demand that President Donald Trump release his tax returns and to dispute his claim that the public doesn’t care about the issue.

The organisers of ‘Tax March’ wanted to call attention to Trump’s refusal to disclose his tax returns, as his predecessors have done for over 40 years. The marches were timed to coincide with the traditional mid-April deadline for US federal tax returns, though the filing date was pushed back two days this year.

Although there is no law requiring presidents to release their tax returns, Trump has found himself under public pressure to do so and some information from a 2005 tax return was leaked to the media last month.

Two of the largest marches took place in New York and Los Angeles, with each drawing around 5,000 people. In Washington DC, over 1,500 people gathered on the front lawn of the US Capitol, where members of Congress addressed the crowd before it marched to the Lincoln Memorial.

“We are taking off the gloves to say knock off the secrecy Mr President,” said Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.

He described Trump’s refusal to release his taxes as being “like a teenager trying to hide a lousy report card”.

Also present at the Washington DC march was law professor Jennifer Taub, who had come up with the idea for the themed march in January after hearing presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway say that the president would not be releasing his tax returns because “people don’t care”. In January, she tweeted of the need for a national protest to show the president that many people do care, and the idea quickly caught on.

“I wanted to express myself and never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be standing here today, seeing this idea that I tweeted out in January come to life,” she told the BBC at a march in Washington DC.

Last month, MSNBC reported on two pages of Trump’s 2005 tax return that were obtained by investigative reporter David Cay Johnston and showed that he paid $38 million in taxes on over $150 million in income. In October, the New York Times reported that Trump had declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 federal tax return, citing three pages of documents from the return.