President Trump started Tuesday making his tax reform sales pitch on talk radio and he will close out his public schedule with a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation.
“This is not a tweet, it is a speech. It will be focused from start to finish,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. “I think it is very important, very helpful.”
After weeks of clashes with fellow Republicans, Trump has devoted much of this week to being a team player. One reason: tax reform is a major part of the agenda he and Republican congressional leaders have in common. With healthcare stalled indefinitely, despite Trump’s confident predictions they finally have the Senate votes to overhaul Obamacare, getting a tax bill passed ahead of next year’s midterm elections has taken on greater importance.
“Trump doesn’t owe the conservative intelligentsia anything,” said a Republican strategist speaking on condition of anonymity. “But he does need them to help pass tax reform.”
Thus on Tuesday, Trump’s tax reform audience isn’t red-state Democrats up for re-election next year, but conservatives.
Much of the conservative movement was against Trump in the Republican primaries and remained unusually unenthusiastic in the general election. Yet social conservatives, the National Rifle Association, and the Heritage Foundation were three movement staples that reprised their familiar roles.
Social conservatives, especially evangelicals, remained loyal foot soldiers for Trump. Exit polls showed the president winning 80 percent of the white evangelical vote in November. The NRA endorsed Trump in May, ahead of the Republican National Convention. And Heritage has worked to shape the Trump administration’s policies, just as it has every GOP president since Ronald Reagan, the first movement conservative to reach the White House.
Trump has a familiar case to make to conservative audiences. He talks about winning the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. He mentions executive orders restricting federal abortion funding and protecting religious liberty. He discusses deregulation. Trump promises that Republicans are getting close on Obamacare. And he touts the “massive tax cuts” that are to come.
That was the case in his speech to the Values Voter Summit last week, days ahead of his Heritage address. Trump called tax cuts “a Christmas gift to all of our hardworking families.” In his joint press conference with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Monday, the president vowed “the largest tax cuts ever passed in this country.”
It didn’t take long after CNN, Trump’s favorite media foil, reported on the president’s “mysterious absence” from conservative talk radio airwaves for him to call into Hugh Hewitt, Chris Plante, Chris Stigall, Tony Katz, Mary Walter, and Vince Coglianese to sell tax cuts.
“Our polling shows just how deeply dissatisfied the American people are with our current tax system, and how much they want tax reform and relief,” said Erin Montgomery, communications director for the pro-Trump America First Policies. “Nobody understands this need better than our president, and we’re thankful for his tireless commitment to getting tax reform done for the middle class. It’s time for Congress to follow suit — the voters are watching.”
At the same time as the need to pass legislation pushes Trump to present a united front with other more conventional conservatives, the Republican Party’s governing class faces pressure from the Right — including from newer activists who trust. Nowhere is this more evident than in the recent politicking by former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who is threatening Republican incumbents with an eye toward unseating McConnell as majority leader (a plan McConnell has cast as unhelpful to enacting tax reform).
But it is already having implications for the 2018 races. Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, a top national GOP recruit for Senate this year, hesitated when asked to commit to supporting McConnell for Republican leader. One of his primary opponents, Austin Petersen, quickly pounced.
Hawley “won the backing of McConnell and other establishment Republicans for the Senate race — now he refuses to commit to either side, masking as an establishment figure one day and an outsider the next,” Petersen told the Washington Examiner. “Unlike Hawley, I have a clear stance on McConnell: If elected to the Senate in 2018, I wouldn’t support him.”
Some conservatives are looking for Trump, who has run hot and cold on the Bannon primaries project, to shift attention away from the political horse race and intraparty intrigue toward tax reform. Norquist, for example, argued that showing Republican policies can increase economic growth and create jobs would be a game-changer.
“You can talk to a 25-year-old about the Reagan tax cuts until you are blue in the face,” Norquist said. “That’s history. You need to make it lived reality.”
