Americans of a certain age can remember when elected Republicans recoiled in horror from the idea of taxing the rich.
Of course, Republicans of a certain age also remember supporting regime-change wars and believing that federal agencies operated as apolitical. Times change, and President Donald Trump has done more than any figure in recent history to effect that change.
Friday on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump floated a politically astute (though perhaps inadvisable) idea for a modest tax increase on the wealthiest Americans, thereby pulling the rug out from under critics who, relying on a propagandized electorate, have cast the president as an agent of “oligarchy” or some such nonsense.
Trump began by framing the idea as politically viable if not for the expected opposition from Democrats.
In fact, the president delivered a history lesson in the process.
“The problem with even a ‘TINY’ tax increase for the RICH,” Trump wrote, “which I and all others would graciously accept in order to help the lower and middle income workers, is that the Radical Left Democrat Lunatics would go around screaming,’Read my lips,’ the fabled Quote by George Bush the Elder that is said to have cost him the Election.”
That, of course, referred to then-President George H.W. Bush’s 1992 election loss to Bill Clinton.
But Trump took it one giant, brilliant step further when he mentioned that election’s populist insurgent.
“NO, Ross Perot cost him the Election!” the president added.
Should a small tax increase be put on the richest Americans?
Trump knew full well what the specter of 1992 independent candidate Ross Perot means even to the modern Republican establishment. Without a fraction of Trump’s political talent, Perot nonetheless managed 19 percent of the overall popular vote. Clinton defeated Bush by less than six percentage points.
In other words, Republicans ignore a populist groundswell at their own peril.
Finally, Trump endorsed the tax hike in language that some might regard as doublespeak.
“In any event, Republicans should probably not do it, but I’m OK if they do!!!” the president concluded.
Traditional conservatives, of course, have not embraced Trump’s cryptic-sounding endorsement.
For instance, on “The Hugh Hewitt Show” podcast, Republican Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho, the Senate Finance Committee Chairman, expressed no enthusiasm for the idea, though Crapo did acknowledge that the president’s enormous political stature would loom large.
“Right now, I’m not excited about the proposal,” Crapo said, per The Wall Street Journal. “If the president weighs in in favor of it, then that’s going to be a big factor that we have to take into consideration.”
Meanwhile, Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, has spoken to Trump and has attempted to talk the president out of supporting the tax hike.
“I gave him my sense of why I thought any discussion of increasing rates was a bad idea: because it would kill jobs, it is damaging to small businesses, nobody in the campaign ever discussed this as an option,” Norquist told NBC News. “The other part is, the entire Republican Party is against it.”
Thus, as one would expect, conservatives hate the idea of even a modest tax increase.
Nonetheless, whether or not Trump pushes for said increase, one should never underestimate the president’s political instincts.
After all, not even the establishment media could spin a proposed tax increase on the wealthy as pro-oligarchy.
Then again, we should also never underestimate the foolishness of the Democratic base. After everything we have witnessed in the last ten years, if you still regard Trump as an agent of oligarchy, then you should cancel your cable subscription immediately and ask for a refund on your education.
In short, the Democrat-dominated establishment IS the oligarchy. For proof, look no further than the voting patterns in America’s wealthiest counties.
Trump knows that elected Republicans and traditional conservatives will hate any tax increase, as well they should. But he also knows that the days of Republican voters deferring to the party establishment’s anti-populist orthodoxy have long since vanished. Thus, making common cause with the latter while gently nudging the GOP establishment in a populist direction makes good political sense.
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