The Gullible Media Fell for Trump Bogus 'New Tax Cut' Scheme - Will Voters?
Donald Trump is either lying about tax cuts, in search of headlines to fool voters who saw through the first Republican tax bill as a giveaway to corporations and the wealthy, or he’s even more delusional than the conspiracy theorists thought. Trump has repeatedly insisted in recent days that a major middle-class tax cut is coming, even though Congress is not in session to pass anything and has no concrete plans matching Trump’s description.
Trump floated the idea on Saturday in Nevada and then insisted on it to reporters on Monday, saying “We’re putting in a resolution sometime in the next week, or week and a half, two weeks.” When reporters followed up on exactly how this was going to happen, with Congress out of session, Trump said “We won’t have time to do the vote. We’ll do the vote later,” specifically “after the election.” He does not appear to be talking about the tweaks to the previous tax plan that the House already passed but which is unlikely to get through the Senate.
We could treat this as a mystery, as Politico does, identifying a series of policy proposals that are neither tax cuts nor going through Congress nor necessarily for middle class people, but that someone somewhere in the Trump administration has proposed and that could maybe be cynically marketed as being almost the same thing as a tax cut. But Occam’s Razor says Trump’s lying, just trying to fool people that a big new middle-class tax cut is somehow guaranteed to happen. The media is predictably cooperating in this scam, with headlines like “Trump eyeing a 10 percent middle-income tax cut plan,” from Reuters and “Trump’s got a new tax plan but no details,” from CNN (not much of a plan, then, is it?), and shame on both of them and every other outlet that falls for his stunt.
Maybe he really is that ignorant or delusional, but the overwhelming odds are that Trump is lying, because he knows his 2017 tax law, the one that was supposed to make everything better for Republicans, is a flop with voters—even many of his own supporters—and he’s hoping to trick people, with an assist from the media. Don’t let him get away with it.
