Rush told the New York mayor, “I’ll be the first to lead the way” out of the blue city. And he was right.

Donald Trump announced on 10/31/19 he was leaving New York, that he was making it official. He said he was going to relocate and establish his residence — in fact, he’d already done it — in Palm Beach, FL. He was very open about why. He said, “Look, I don’t like the way I’m being treated here.” The same people in New York who were now ripping him used to beg him for money, seek his endorsement, and try to get on his TV show. Then he came out as a Republican, and all of that ended.

Trump said taxes were not the primary reason he was relocating, but I think they’re a big factor. He will still have to file New York taxes, because his business is there. The inheritance tax will be a big deal as well. Tax-wise, it’s a smart thing to do.

I remember I was playing golf with Trump at his golf course back, oh, ten, fifteen years ago, and he asked me, “Why did you leave New York? Why did you really leave? Because, Rush, I’m hearing more and more people saying they’ve got to get out.”

So I told him this story of how I left New York in 1997 and came down to Florida:

When I started the radio show in 1988, it was just constant work — building the network from 56 stations to 600 stations in four years. In that time I wrote two books, and then the Rush Limbaugh TV show started. My broadcast partners feared I had not taken any significant vacation time. That was because I was loving it. I was so into what was happening. It was a success track unlike any I had ever experienced. But my partners began to worry I would burn out if I didn’t take some time just to get away.

They got together with Roger Ailes, executive producer of my TV show, who had a condo in the Palm Beach vicinity, and arranged for me to come down on a weekend in the middle of February. In order to do this, I had to beat a New York City snowstorm. A 14-inch blizzard was on the way, and it started about 2 pm. My program ended at 3. So I had to hightail it to the airport and try to beat the weather. I did.

It was 85 degrees the entire weekend. This condo was on the 24th floor, right on the ocean. I’d never been in a place like that. I’d never stayed in a hotel on the ocean where you could hear the waves, you could see the sharks. And I decompressed, relaxed, like I didn’t ever remember relaxing. It was just two or three days, but I was out on the deck day and night, reading this and reading that. I liked it so much I started coming back. Then I ended up purchasing a little Florida place, intending it to be for six weeks a year. But there was no way it was only going to be six weeks a year.

And finally I made the decision, once it all was clear to me, on taxes. I was paying through the nose in New York — state, city, federal, unincorporated business — whatever they can hit you with, they do. So sometime in the middle of 1997, I made the call to move to Florida permanently. My primary reasons were lifestyle and climate and escaping taxes.

My parents taught me never to talk about money, that it wasn’t good manners, so I won’t tell you how much money it saved me by moving to Florida. But trust me, you would completely understand why I did it. And when I announced it, giving that reason, here came the critics: “You’re selfish. You’re trying to escape your civic responsibility.”

What do you mean “selfish”? I think it’s rather smart, for crying out loud, when I have an option not to pay that. Besides, the people there didn’t even like me. So I spent eight years in New York, did what I had to do there, and moved to Florida. I wrote the tax authorities in Albany and informed them that I had moved, and I sent them copies of my new Florida driver’s license.

Oh, that was another reason! I loved driving. I couldn’t drive in New York City. For a whole host of reasons, I had to be chauffeured. The first thing I did after moving to Florida was buy a car. I hadn’t driven one in eight years; it was something I really missed. So I’m tooling around, and I found a couple of clubs that would accept me, just to join to prove I was a resident. One of them was the Governors Club. I was doing anything I could to prove to those people that I lived in Florida.

Well, you’ve heard me tell the rest of the story. I got audited for the next 12 years. The New York state tax authorities audited me, and folks, this is not an exaggeration. Every audit was for three years’ worth of returns. I had to prove where I was every day of the year, 14 different ways: credit card receipts, computer IP addresses, flight and travel records, hotels. Even with all that, they thought I was lying. In tax disputes you are automatically guilty, and have to prove your innocence.

They were subpoenaing employees and sweating them, trying to get them to say, “He doesn’t really live in Florida. He lives in his New York condominium.” They were called in as witnesses. “He just has that place to try to escape, right? He’s here all the time, right?”

“No, he’s not!” But New York demanded to visit both of my residences to see which one was really the most lived in. This went on for 12, maybe 13 years.

Still, I did not spend in legal fees as much as I would have spent had I stayed there and paid New York taxes. I think states like New York have divisions in their tax departments that follow people who move to no-income-tax states. If you move to Texas, if you move to Kentucky, if you move to Florida, I think they follow you.

So when I told Trump all that, he was shocked: “It’s incredible! Why would they hassle you like that?” I said, “They can’t stand losing the money. They’re just trying to get as much of it as they can, even after you leave.”

Trump told me, “Well, I’m thinking about it. But I don’t know how I can leave. Everything I have, everything I do, is in New York. I don’t see how I can go, but I know more and more people who are talking about it.” This was ten or fifteen years ago.

And now there is an exodus, and it’s not just from New York. It’s from other high-tax states. And don’t forget, with the state and local tax deduction limitation, state taxes are now much higher for people in these high-tax blue states. Look what they’re getting for it! The cities, in large part, are cesspools, and the income gap, the divide between haves and have-nots, is widening. Everywhere you look, the evidence of out-of-control, unchecked liberalism is creating misery and disaster. When people do have the ability to flee it, they do.

The problem, as you know, is that when liberals flee, they take all the crap they believe with them to the new location, and they start corrupting that place. They start polluting it with their liberalism. Liberalism travels.

So I understood Donald Trump leaving New York. Of course, when I left, New York state officials were vicious and mocking. I left New York in 1997, but I had a condo, which I loved. In 2009, in an effort to beat these endless audits, I decided to sell the condo. I announced I would sell it and never do another day’s work in New York, because the deal I had with New York tax authorities meant I owed them a minimum flat amount, and you wouldn’t believe how much this was.

If I showed up and did my radio program in New York for three hours one day, I owed them more money than the average annual income is in this country. So I didn’t go. It wasn’t the money; it was the principle. So I sold the condo because I thought that would convince them I had no place to stay in New York. Didn’t work. “You could be hiding out in a hotel under assumed name,” they said. This was my on-air announcement on March 30, 2009:

“I told Mayor Bloomberg, ‘I’ll be the first to lead the way. This is just ridiculous. I’ll sell my condominium. I’m going to get out of there totally, because this is just absurd, and it isn’t going to work. It’s punishing the achievers for the mistakes and the lack of discipline on the part of a bunch of corrupt politicians who have run that city and state into the ground for I don’t know how many years, and I, for one, am not going to take the blame for it.’”

When I made that announcement, the fact that I had already moved in 1997 was kind of under the radar. I hadn’t made a big deal about it. But I did this time, by announcing selling the condo and getting out completely. The New York Governor at the time, David Paterson, held a press conference and gloated: “If I knew that would be the result, I would have thought about the taxes earlier.”

If we could have gotten rid of Limbaugh faster, I woulda raised taxes sooner, in other words. Well, that was the same attitude Gov. Andrew Cuomo had when Trump announced he was leaving. When The New York Times reported Trump “filed residency paperwork for Florida, a favorite of the wealthy for tax reasons,” Cuomo tweeted: “Good riddance. It’s not like Donald Trump paid taxes here anyway. He’s all yours, Florida.”

See, that’s all you are to them. To liberal politicians, you’re just taxpayers, and you’re just voters to be pandered to every two or four years. That’s all you matter to them. So even though my name wasn’t in any of the stories about Trump leaving, I was the beginning of the exodus in the state of New York — and there have been many more since. As always, on the cutting edge of societal evolution.

Illustration created for The Limbaugh Letter ©2021 Dominick Finelle