The Note: Trump's tax day

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April 26, 2017

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Trump's tax day

The big story

The tax reform push is shaping up as the purest slice of the Trump agenda yet, an effort, mostly independent of Congress, to distill the president's ideas into a bold legislative concept. As such, it appears disjointed and haphazard, not to mention mixed up with the stop-and-start health care push and the lingering need to keep the government's lights on. Wedged together are major corporate tax cuts, individual tax cuts, expanded deductions and even Ivanka Trump's favored child-care tax credit. The so-called "pay-fors," ideas including the border-adjustment tax, look like they'll be left out. The package looks unlikely to comply with congressional budget rules, making the tricky politics even more complicated. As for deficit hawks, they'll be left out or called out as this proceeds. But this is the big Trump play; that he and his team can sell reforms whose only ideology is President Trump himself.

The sleeper story

Beating up on former national security adviser Michael Flynn may seem easy enough, now that he's gone. Still, Tuesday's bipartisan slap-down of Flynn by the chairman and ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee was startling, and sweeping in its implications. Flynn is in very real legal trouble, just based on the classified documents Congress has reviewed showing a failure to disclose or seek permission for accepting payments from an arm of the Russian government. And, of course, the story goes on for other Trump associates, and the Trump White House itself. According to the oversight committee, the White House is refusing to provide requested documents that may show what the Trump transition effort knew about Flynn's contacts with foreign governments. As that gets caught up in a separation-of-powers argument, remember that the FBI is still on the case as well. Another sign the story won't disappear: 39 percent in the new ABC News-Washington Post poll believe the Trump campaign intentionally tried to assist efforts by Russia to influence the election.

The shiny story

You almost can't make it up. A major piece of White House messaging, in arguing the case for a high-impact first 100 days, is the number of executive orders signed by President Trump. It's 30, by the White House count, compared with only 19 in the same period signed by President Obama. You almost have to not look for old Trump quotes, or conservative critiques of executive overreach, to miss the ironies. ("I don't like them. And our country wasn't based on executive orders," Trump said in January 2016.) And now comes a fresh rebuke from the courts, ruling that the Department of Justice can't withhold grant money from so-called sanctuary cities. Trump was on Twitter early today blasting the "ridiculous rulings" by judges that blocked this and the travel ban. So, yes, the president is not only touting his own executive orders as evidence of accomplishments but also touting actions that federal judges are blocking as unconstitutional. The courts, it seems, continue to take the president literally.

TLDR

It's tax day, a few days late, as the White House unveils a tax reform plan today that will include corporate and individual tax cuts, plus Ivanka Trump's favored child care tax credit.