So the Donald Trump campaign has this new ad in which the economy is the focus, with the narrator intoning that in "Hillary Clinton’s America, the middle class gets crushed," while in Trump's America "working families get tax relief. Millions of new jobs created. Wages go up. Small businesses thrive." All pretty typical for a Republican message, but Steve Benen see a problem in the fine print.
To the Trump campaign’s credit, the commercial includes footnotes of sorts for many of its core claims. For example, at the 15-second mark, when the narrator says “working families get tax relief” in Trump’s America, there’s small text at the bottom that reads, “A Pro-Growth Tax Code For All Americans, GOP: A Better Way, 6/24/16.”
Why does that matter? Because “A Pro-Growth Tax Code For All Americans, GOP: A Better Way, 6/24/16” is House Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) tax plan, not Donald Trump’s. They’re actually pretty different, and include their own marginal rates, which makes it odd for Trump to cite the House GOP’s plan as if it were his own.
A couple of seconds later, the same ad includes fine print that reads, “ ‘Details and analysis of the 2016 House Republican Tax Reform Plan,’ Tax Foundation, 7/15/16.” And while I’d take issue with the center-right Tax Foundation’s analysis of Ryan’s plan, the point is, again, that Trump has a different plan.
In fact, Trump has so far explicitly not endorsed the Paul Ryan tax plan, offering his own, albeit similar, plan a few weeks ago. And that's what makes the next bit highlighted by Benen even more bizarre. The ad flashes up another footnote, "Details and analysis of Donald Trump’s Tax Plan, Tax Foundation, 9/29/15." But that was last year's plan, the one Trump abandoned—wiped from his website, even.
Does Trump have a plan? Does his campaign know if he has a plan? Is anyone in that whole operating paying any attention to these kinds of details? NBC asked the Trump campaign. "A spokesman for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment."