Day 305: Trump Keeps Shooting Himself in the Foot
Trump accidentally admits that the GOP’s tax bill is about politics and donors, not ideology.
Donald Trump is desperate for a legislative win. After months of missteps, multiple failed attempts to repeal and kinda-sorta replace the Affordable Care Act, Trump sees the one-year mark rapidly approaching with virtually nothing tangible accomplished and poll numbers reflecting the lack of achievement.
That’s what makes tax reform so important to him. Never mind that the bill will cause tax hikes for many middle-class taxpayers while universally giving the richest Americans the vast majority of the benefits, Trump wants to get anything passed, even as a Fox News polls shows just a quarter of Americans approve the plan.
The Senate is currently made up of 52 Republicans and 48 Democrats. With a toss-up December special election in Alabama on the horizon, that margin could easily shrink to 51–49 within weeks. If Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) can’t get the bill to the floor before then, and Democrat Doug Jones defeats Republican Roy Moore in Alabama, the chances of passage get even hairier for the GOP.
Either way, every vote will matter, as the Democrats will certainly unanimously vote against the bill, while they try to pry a couple Republicans to their side of the aisle, as they did during the healthcare battles.
Knowing this, it makes no sense that Trump would attack a Republican who has not announced his feelings about the bill one way or another.
There’s the usual absurdity, name-calling and self-aggrandizing in the above-tweet, of course, but there’s a more subtle, accidental admission in there too.
Trump notes that Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who is retiring at the end of his term in 2018, will vote against tax cuts because it’s the end of his political career anyway.
The only logical conclusion here is that Trump is admitting that Flake is now free to vote his conscience and what is right since he’s no longer beholden to vote on party lines or because of donors. In other words, the only reason someone would vote for the tax bill is for political gain, not ideological values.
This acknowledgement undermines Trump’s other, longstanding rhetoric on tax reform and underscores just how much Trump wants to get this done as a political win more than some desire to help the average American. By attacking Flake — who absolutely could still vote for the bill — Trump is continuing to prove himself less a brilliant political tactician and more a neophytic Neanderthal.
305 days in, 1157 to go
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