| As President Donald Trump wraps up his first 100 days in office, Congress is taking the baton on his agenda, looking to pass a significant tax cut. Yet Trump himself recently considered actually increasing taxes on millionaires. Ben Steverman writes today about the president’s break (even temporarily) with Republican values. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. In 1999, flirting with a run for president on the Reform Party ticket, a 53-year-old real estate mogul named Donald Trump floated an unusual way to wipe out the US national debt, then a whopping $5.7 trillion. His idea—which he claimed economists had privately labeled “brilliant”—was a one-time wealth tax. Taking 14.25% of every fortune greater than $10 million would bring in just enough money to entirely balance the nation’s books, he said. A quarter-century later, with the national debt up to $36 trillion, President Trump toyed with a less novel way to tax the rich, raising millionaires’ top income tax rate to 40% from 37%, which would bring in an estimated $400 billion over a decade.  Trump, shown attending a boxing match in 1999, recently pulled back from one tax fight. Photographer: Rossa W. Cole/Sygma Predictably, many conservatives were horrified. Since at least the Reagan administration, Republicans have united around one goal: cutting taxes. When the GOP took power in Washington, you could pretty much guarantee that rates would fall, with special attention to lightening the burden on wealthy “job creators.” This time, surprisingly, not everyone in the party of Reagan rejected the idea of a millionaire tax hike outright. Leading lawmakers were at least polite. “We’ll have to see,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said. Finally, after a couple of weeks of speculation, Trump appears to have killed the idea. “I actually love the concept, but I don’t want it to be used against me politically, because I’ve seen people lose elections for less,” Trump said in a Time magazine interview published Friday. That the proposal got this far, and that a Republican president was admitting a fondness for taxing the rich, shows how thoroughly Trump has made over the political party he now leads, with millions of working-class voters replacing its traditional base of affluent suburbanites. The flirtation with taxing millionaires also demonstrates how difficult it is to predict what lawmakers will and won’t include in the tax bill they’ve vowed to pass this year. Congress returns from a recess this week to work on the budget reconciliation bill that’s the centerpiece of Trump’s legislative agenda. But when “everything is on the table,” as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said, then nothing is off the table. Facing narrow majorities in Congress and US debt at its highest level since World War II, Republicans need maximum flexibility to have any hope of keeping trillions of dollars of promises to taxpayers. Although Republicans share the goal of extending provisions of the 2017 law overhauling taxes that are set to expire in 2026, they disagree on what else to prioritize. Lawmakers’ goals include repealing the estate tax and raising the deduction for state and local taxes, or SALT, while Trump has promised no taxes on Social Security, tips and overtime. It’s an uncertain situation that keeps lobbyists up at night and leaves advisers to the wealthy scratching their heads. “We’re living in such an era of unpredictability,” says Andrew Gradman, a Los Angeles-based tax lawyer. “I just tell my clients we’ll start planning when the legislation is there. It’s not out of laziness, it’s out of mistrust for the process.” | 
