Trump’s been making a lot of wild promises lately. All restraints are gone. He’s even bribed the oil companies with vows to remove all regulations if they’ll give him a billion dollars. Dave Weigel took a look at how its landing:
Ending all taxes on tips. Declassifying all files on 9/11 and the JFK assassination. Freeing a darknet market mogul from prison. Protecting Bitcoin and TikTok from government meddlers.
In his four-year presidency, Donald Trump did none of that. In the last few weeks, he’s promised to do all of it — sometimes in front of crowds ready to cheer his new policies, sometimes with interviewers who don’t ask why he flipped. Democrats, already battling voter “Trumpnesia” and warmer feelings about the MAGA years, are now wrestling with out-of-nowhere promises that don’t match up with Trump’s record.
The latest promise, to make tipped wages tax-free, debuted at Trump’s Sunday rally in Las Vegas. “We’re going to do that right away, first thing in office,” said the Republican nominee. “It’s been a point of contention for years and years and years.”
Trump had never endorsed this before, or mentioned it during 2017’s yearlong tax cut debate. The Biden campaign said that Trump’s “wild campaign promise” couldn’t be trusted, and that Democrats wanted to end the tipped minimum wage, a policy with more direct worker benefits, which Republicans opposed.
But on Monday night, Fox News praised Trump’s “tip tax cut” and explained how it could swing the election. On Wednesday, Trump-endorsed Nevada US Senate Sam Brown told NBC News that the “visionary” ex-president had “scooped” him on a proposal he was about to run on himself. By Thursday, Trump was rallying House Republicans for the tax cut, and Senate Republicans were praising a “brilliant idea” that no one had a plan to implement yet.
“I think we should put it on the table,” Sen. John Cornyn told Semafor. “We’re gonna consider everything else, so it might as well be part of it.”
I wonder if they’re putting the 100% tariff replacement for income tax on the table too?
Weigel sees this as a problem for Democrats:
Trump’s breezy willingness to reverse himself was a problem for Democrats in 2016. Polls found that voters saw him as more moderate than Hillary Clinton; he could hit her from the right on abortion and immigration, from the left on trade and criminal justice reform, and from the center on gay rights.
That wasn’t the case in 2020, when Democrats ran against specific, unpopular Trump agenda items — an unsuccessful push to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the passage of polarizing tax cuts.
This cycle has been more of a muddle, shaped by nostalgia for pre-COVID prices and interest rates, and blurred memories of what happened when. A poll conducted for Politico last month found 37% of voters crediting Trump with new infrastructure investments, compared to 40% who credited President Joe Biden, even though the investments famously didn’t happen under Trump.
According to Weigel, some libertarians are giving him the benefit of the doubt over his promise to commute the sentence of the convicted drug dealer mogul and go all in on crypto currency (“I want all bitcoin made in the USA!”)even though he ignored them back when he was president. They blame it on his former staff (“swamp creatures”) and believe he’ll surround himself with people who will do what they want this time.
As one critic points out, “all of his dealings with this are just totally transactional. If it’s in his interest to release them, he’ll release them; if he doesn’t think it’s in his interest, he won’t.”
In other words, his promises don’t mean jack.
Weigel has this to say:
There’s an old Clintonworld assessment of the 2016 election that’s stuck with me for eight years. I’ll paraphrase it: “We built an Italian sports car, and Trump made us take it off road.” There is a tried-and-true populist way that Democrats win national elections, epitomized by the 2012 campaign that portrayed Mitt Romney as a vulture capitalist who’d cut taxes on the rich. Trump’s unpredictability prevented Hillary Clinton from doing that.
Democrats are trying to do that again, with three binders of material — Trump’s record, his promises to rich donors that he’ll cut their taxes, and the Project 2025 portfolio of conservative policies being prepped for a second administration. But there’s a powerful monomyth about Trump, which the Libertarian Party’s chair summed up well. In the first term, he had the wrong advisors; the next President Trump would be unencumbered, and could do anything.
“Don’t worry” they say, “he’ll be free of all those swamp creatures who stopped him from doing what he always wanted to do last time. He’ll get rid of them and good MAGA true believers will carry out his agenda.” Basically, they are saying that he used to be an inept fool whose first term was really just a practice run. Now he knows what he’s doing and he won’t fuck up so much.
That’s quite a pitch don’t you think?
