President Donald Trump is giving Congress conflicting messages on whether he wants a tax hike on high-income earners to help pay for his legislative agenda.
“What you do is you’re giving up something up top in order to make people in the middle income and the lower income brackets save more. So it’s really a redistribution, and I’m willing to do it if they want,” Trump told reporters Friday evening during a bill and executive order signing. “I would love to be able to give people in a lower bracket a big break by giving up some of what I have.”
Trump said that he considered it to be “good politics to do it, where richer people give up, and it’s a very small, it’s like a point, but they give it up to benefit people who are lower.”
Trump appeared to have a different opinion hours earlier in a post on Truth Social, contending Republicans “should probably not do it.”
“The problem with even a ‘TINY’ tax increase for the RICH, 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,” Trump posted.
“NO, Ross Perot cost him the Election!” he added. “In any event, Republicans should probably not do it, but I’m OK if they do!!!”
One day earlier, Trump reportedly asked Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to consider a new tax bracket for those making more than $2.5 million, raising the top rate from 37% to 39.6%.
The White House proposal to create a new tax bracket would upend decades of GOP orthodoxy but could also help fund other tax carve-outs Trump wants, such as exemptions for tips, overtime, and Social Security benefits.
Those proposals were central to his working-class pitch on the campaign trail last year, but tax writers approved a budget framework that essentially caps the cost of their legislation at $4.5 trillion, giving Republicans little wiggle room to incorporate his priorities.
“This will help pay for massive middle — and working-class tax cuts and protect Medicaid,” a source told the Washington Examiner.
Extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is part of the GOP’s “one big, beautiful bill,” which is being crafted through a process called reconciliation that lets Republicans bypass the 60-vote filibuster in the Senate.
This is not the first time Trump has given conflicting signals to Congress. He previously told a group of Senate Republicans he was open to raising the top marginal tax rate. Then, on April 24, Trump said he thought raising taxes would be “disruptive because a lot of the millionaires would leave the country.”
Johnson, for his part, has said he’s “not a big fan of” raising taxes on the wealthy, reflecting an establishment GOP view that lower taxes encourage investment and that people, rather than the government, should decide how to spend their money.
“We’re the Republican Party, and we’re for tax reduction for everyone,” he said at the time. “So, I mean, that’s a general principle that we always try to abide by.”
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Trump’s social media post seems to reflect another concern — that raising taxes, even on high-earners, could come back to haunt the GOP via Democratic attack ads in the midterm elections.
His post references a promise President George H.W. Bush made in 1988 — “Read my lips: No new taxes” — a pledge he could not keep that contributed to his loss in the 1992 election.
