Man, this is just hilarious.
For years, Republicans have run for office on promises of cutting taxes and bolstering business to stimulate economic growth, pledging allegiance to a Reaganesque model of conservatism that has largely become the party’s orthodoxy.
But now the entire rationale for the Republican Party's existence is being ripped out by the roots by the fearsome Trumpenstein, leaving them scrambling to explain to their ultrawealthy donors why their undisputed frontrunner is advocating levying higher taxes on them:
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on American companies that put their factories in other countries. He has threatened to increase taxes on the compensation of hedge fund managers. And he has vowed to change laws that allow American companies to benefit from cheaper tax rates by using mergers to base their operations outside the United States.
This was certainly not the way the Club For Growth expected things to be playing out as the primary season kicks in to high gear:
Alarmed that those ideas might catch on with some of Mr. Trump’s Republican rivals — as his immigration policies have — the Club for Growth, an anti-tax think tank, is pulling together a team of economists to scrutinize his proposals and calculate the economic impact if he is elected.
The irony of having their nominee rise to prominence on the anti-immigrant hatred they would normally exploit to keep their short-sighted base pulling the "R" lever while the corporations behind the GOP curtain continue to reap more and more tax breaks, only to see the same nominee turn around and start snapping back at them, must be disconcerting, to say the least. The
Times quotes an American Enterprise Institute
mouthpiece for the hedge fund industry who concurs, with a masterful degree of understatement:
“Those aren’t the types of things a typical Republican candidate would say,” said Michael R. Strain, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, referring to the candidate’s comments on hedge funds, support for entitlement spending and the imposing of trade tariffs. “A lot of these things are not things that businesses would be happy about.”
Ya think?
The corporations who speak through and fund the Club For Growth and the American Enterprise Institute have bet big--to the tune of billions of dollars--on buying this election. They stand to make enormous profits in a Republican Administration that would turn their "loopholes" in the tax code into gaping openings for unchecked, untaxed profits to sail through. That is the entire reason the Republican Party exists in the first place--it has nothing to do with immigration. That is the simply the red cape they wave to infuriate the angry charging beast that makes up the GOP base. The people who run the Republican Party care as little about undocumented immigrants as they do about abortion--in fact, they thrive on the cheap labor undocumented immigrants provide. These shiny-object social issues are a means to an end, nothing more. And that end is now being threatened, big time. Even the hedge fund managers are reduced to pleading their cause:
Anthony Scaramucci, a managing partner of SkyBridge Capital who supports Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin in the Republican presidential race, visited Mr. Trump last week to complain about the way he was talking about hedge fund managers. Still frustrated, Mr. Scaramucci took to Twitter over the weekend to say that Mr. Trump is “misinformed” about the industry and that he and most of his colleagues pay the highest marginal tax rate.
Weep for them. The
Times quotes another hedge fund master-of-the-Universe type who darkly warns that if Trump keeps this up, the hedge funds will have to all band together and create a SuperPAC to back a candidate who'll tell "their side of the story." Except they've already done that--it's called the
entire remaining GOP field.
Some voices on the right
recognize a big potential problem (beyond Trump himself) looming here, and are trying to quickly sketch up some kind of back-of-the-envelope plan to deal with it. Others try to console themselves by acknowledging the obvious--Trump is just saying whatever gets him the most clicks and eyeballs and has no plan or intent on following through with anything he says. They cite his
one-minute flip-flopping on the concept of a flat tax, for example, as indicative of the fact that he doesn't have a clue what he's saying. And that's probably true. But when your standard-bearer is undercutting the very reason for your existence with pro-tax populist rhetoric, and the base is eating it up, it's going to be very hard to move that train back onto the rails if and when the GOP somehow finds a way to deactivate its monster.