David M. Drucker: Why I ignore what the president says about taxing the wealthy

I’m a political writer in Washington and I ignore Donald Trump. It’s the only way, I’ve concluded after nearly a decade covering the 45th and 47th president, to make sense of his administration.

Take tax increases. Trump hasn’t ruled out raising income levies on wealthy earners and corporations. Or has he?

Newt Gingrich, a Republican former speaker of the House of Representatives and prominent Trump supporter, insisted to Politico the president has taken millionaire tax hikes off the table. Larry Kudlow, Trump’s chief White House economic advisor during the first term, believes the same about potential corporate tax increases. “Mr. Trump — and the House and Senate Republican leaders — have all agreed to the current policy baseline, which merely extends the 2017 tax cut,” he said during an episode of his daily Fox Business Network program.

If you listen to Trump’s comments on the matter, it’s not wholly unreasonable to interpret him thusly.

“George Bush said, ‘READ MY LIPS, NO NEW TAXES,’ then proceeded to give a rather small Tax increase, and was obliterated,” Trump said in a note to Gingrich about President George H.W. Bush’s notorious broken promise that the former speaker published in an X post . “While I love the idea of a small increase, the Democrats would probably use it against us, and we would be, like Bush, helpless to do anything about it! So, if you can do without it, you’re probably better off trying to do so. We don’t need to be the ‘READ MY LIPS’ gang who lost an Election, for no reason!”

And here’s Trump in a subsequent Oval Office news conference when asked if he supported forcing high earners to fork over more of their income to the federal government: “I think it would be very disruptive because a lot of the millionaires would leave the country. In the old days, they left states — they’d go from one state to the other. Now, with transportation so quick and so easy, they leave countries. You lose a lot of money if you do that,” the president said . “Other countries that have done it have lost a lot of people; they lose their wealthy people — that would be bad.”

Politics and wealth accumulation are (almost) everything to Trump, and those statements sure sound like a rather definitive case against tax hikes. And after all, Trump is a Republican, and the GOP is historically hostile to raising taxes — no matter the circumstances (as Bush discovered).

Except there was something missing from both Trump’s short missive to Gingrich and his answer to the reporter’s question in the Oval: Anything along the lines of: “I oppose raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations and will veto any legislation that does so.”

Instead, what we’ve heard from Trump the past few weeks is rhetoric extolling the virtues of tax hikes on the rich.

“I would not mind personally paying more,” Trump told Time . “I’d be raising them on the wealthy to take care of the middle class. And that’s — I love, that. I actually love that concept.” Indeed, the president jumpstarted this entire conversation when he told a group of GOP senators he was open to crossing the Republican Rubicon on this politically charged issue.

A Republican government affairs executive in Washington who supports Trump said the president is almost always deliberately vague. This party operative described the strategy as usually beneficial to Trump, but just as often problematic for his political allies.

“Trump always leaves himself maximum flexibility. That’s the magic to his speak,” this GOP insider said, requesting anonymity to candidly assess the president. “It’s annoying, too, because people walk away thinking he’s with you. He isn’t.”

Trump and congressional Republicans are searching for revenue to cover the cost of extending at least most of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, enacted during the president’s first term and sunsetting at year’s end. They also need money to pay for Trump’s 2024 campaign promises. This category of new proposals includes eliminating income taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security; increasing the deduction for state and local taxes (SALT); and creating a new deduction for car-loan interest on American-made automobiles.

As Bloomberg News reported in coverage of the reconciliation package — the “big, beautiful bill” House and Senate Republicans are crafting to satisfy these fiscal and political demands — one option is raising taxes from 37% to 40% on individuals earning more than $1 million annually. Another, as I reported , is reducing or ending the corporate SALT deduction. Multiple Republican sources have confirmed to me that both proposals are real and in play. Meanwhile, there’s certainly been no unequivocal repudiation from Trump.

Which is why I feel comfortable ignoring Trump, or at least, ignoring what he says, as has been my practice over the first 100-plus days of his second term. It’s counter to how I handled coverage of the president during his first term, when my reporting seemed to hang on every provocative tweet, gaggle, news conference and televised cabinet meeting. This time around, I’m focusing on what Trump does. And that has meant paying closer attention to executive orders and boring White House press releases. As veteran Democratic operative James Carville might say: It’s the paperwork, stupid.

It’s an approach some journalists quibble with.

“It’s a reasonable practice. I get why you and others in our industry think it’s the best approach, because what we’ve long done has never seemed quite right or effective,” said Issac Bailey, a McClatchy columnist and communications professor at Davidson College in North Carolina. “I’m just not convinced it is the right approach. What Trump says also matters. That’s never not going to be true as long as he’s president.”

“We’ve long understood that what a president says can move markets, which is precisely what we’ve seen in recent weeks,” Bailey added.

Bailey is right, of course. But that raises the question: Would retail investors have been better off ignoring what Trump was saying for the last month regarding tariffs? Or paying close attention to what he did, or didn’t, do with trade policy? I know my answer.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

David M. Drucker is columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a senior writer for The Dispatch and the author of "In Trump's Shadow: The Battle for 2024 and the Future of the GOP."