Tax policy has been a core part of the Republican party. A central feature within the GOP, particularly since Reagan, has been cutting taxes for corporations and some of the wealthiest Americans. President Trump, breaking away from traditional party orthodoxy, recently raised the idea of increasing taxes on some of the country’s richest. Our guest this week points out that Republicans have made a “devil’s bargain” with Trump. Arjun Singh is the co-host and senior producer of the “Lever Time” podcast. He is also the lead reporter and editor of the Tax Revolt miniseries. He joins WITHpod to discuss historical and contemporary fights over taxes, coalitions effects of MAGA, what the latest intraparty disagreements could portend and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
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Arjun Singh: What about the freedom to not have a giant rich corporation beat me up because I have no choice but to buy the food that they sell? What’s the freedom of allowing Walmart to get so big it destroyed all the mom and pop general stores and grocery stores that when I was growing up, I was told are the, quote, unquote, “backbone of Main Street” in America. So we talk about taxation as a means of limiting freedom, but what about all the freedoms that are taken from us because now the government doesn’t do its job?
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Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
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Chris Hayes: If you were to ask yourself the question, what is the defining feature of the Republican Party, there’s a lot of ways you can answer that question. You could say conservatism, although that’s itself kind of a little question begging because there’s different ways you define that. People could talk about opposition to reproductive choice, which has been a bedrock sort of center of the coalition for 45 years. You could talk about fiscal conservatism sometimes what people talk about, but that’s nonsense because deficits go up under every Republican president, particularly under combined Republican governance, like, always. So, that’s actually, like, a complete lie. It’s 180 degrees away from the truth.
The answer, I think, is the central core feature and belief of the Republican Party is cutting taxes for rich people. Whenever they get in power, there’s stuff they might do. They might put on tariffs, or they might take tariffs off, or they might run deficits. They might cut social service programs. Sometimes they cut them. Sometimes they don’t cut them. Actually, kind of depends on, like, what they do. The one thing you can always be sure of, always, is that they will cut taxes for rich people. Ronald Reagan cut taxes for rich people. George H. W. Bush cut taxes for rich people and then raised taxes, and that was the great betrayal. He was primaried subsequently. He lost reelection.
George W. Bush didn’t make that same mistake twice, cut taxes for rich people multiple times. Donald Trump only passed one major piece of legislation with his unified governance the first time around, and you’ll never guess what it was, it cut taxes for rich people and corporations. And now here we are again. For all of the things that Donald Trump has done, wildly destructive assault on the American constitutional order, assault on the institutions of governance, assault on the ability of the government to deliver services to people and on the civil service and on and on and on. They have been remarkably unproductive legislatively so far. In fact, it’s the fewest amount of bills signed into law, I think, going back to Eisenhower. And now they’ve got their big chance, and you’ll never guess, you will never guess what the center of this bill is. Can you guess what they want to do in this bill? Yes, you got it. They want to cut taxes for rich people. You cannot understand the modern Republican Party without understanding its position on tax policy, which is the core of the party, particularly since Reagan, and what’s known as the tax revolt. And right now, this week, now that we’ve got the markup of the new big, beautiful bill, the Tax Cut for Rich People Act, that Republicans are going to try push through again, I thought it’s a good time to talk about both the history and the present of this unifying feature of the Republican Party, the one enduring thing, the thing that defines them more than anything else.
And so, I thought I’d talk to Arjun Singh, who’s the co-host and Senior Producer of the “Lever Time” podcast. He’s a lead reporter and editor of a miniseries they’ve done over there on the “Lever” called “The Tax Revolt.” He’s also covering the tax bill in Congress right now. Arjun, good to have you on.
Arjun Singh: Excellent to be with you, Chris. Thanks for having me.
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Chris Hayes: Well, I guess let’s start with the thing that happened in the last few days, which is really interesting, and then we’ll get into the history. There was this very funny little thing, this little flurry about the possibility that Donald Trump would execute a revolution in Republican Party orthodoxy and force Congress to raise taxes on wealthy people. Tell me a little bit about the floating of this and then what ended up happening.
Arjun Singh: This is a really fascinating point in Republican politics, Chris, because I think, first and foremost, what it tells you is that the Republican Party, as you aptly described, has been a party of tax cuts. It’s clearly the party of Donald Trump. And when Donald Trump says jump, a lot of Republicans, at least in his expectation, should say, “how high?” Does it fit with their tax cutting agenda? Does it fit with the proud staunch Republicans who have been out there decade after decade saying taxes are theft, it’s evil? It doesn’t make sense in that party. It only makes sense that the president wants to cut a deal and he’s asking them to do that any way what’s possible.
What I found really interesting about what is happening here is that I had previously spoke with Grover Norquist. Grover Norquist is the head of the Americans for Tax Reform. He is an anti-tax activist, but I would say that he has been one of the strongest movers in pushing the Republican Party into being a unilaterally tax cutting party. And you mentioned George Herbert Walker Bush. Norquist has pushed Republicans to the point that even if you make a compromise, if your party’s not in power, you still need to cut taxes or at least block tax efforts. He was the one who pushed this party to be this way. When I asked him about that, he basically said, B.S., there’s no truth to that. The president would never do that.
And so, I think you’re actually seeing a very interesting moment between the Republican activists who have, in their estimation, built this party. I mean, you’re talking about a Grover Norquist. I’ll include someone like former Congressman Newt Gingrich in there. But you had bomb throwing activists who really pushed this party into becoming an anti-tax party. They made a devil’s bargain with Donald Trump. And as with anyone who makes a bargain with Donald Trump, they’re realizing that Donald Trump wants to get what Donald Trump wants. And so, it will be interesting, but you might actually see some significant resistance from actual Republicans on even raising taxes.
Chris Hayes: Well, here’s what I find so interesting. Right? So, there’s all these ways in which Donald Trump has kind of remade the Republican Party ideologically. And people always talk about the cult of personality, and everyone falls in line. Like, the Republican Party had been kind of Russia skeptical, Russia antagonistic. Donald Trump has changed it to be Russia friendly. Right? And you hear some grumbling around the margins, but they don’t do very much. The Republican Party had been a party that had been extremely “pro free trade.” I’m putting that in quotation marks because that can mean a lot of different things, but very skeptical of tariffs, I think it’s fair to say, and high tariffs.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: There are some exceptions. Bush slapped on steel tariffs, etcetera. He’s changed that around with (inaudible), right? I mean, that’s a huge tax hike. Right?
Arjun Singh: Yes.
Chris Hayes: That’s some tariffs —
Arjun Singh: That’s a tax, as Norquist admitted too.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Unilaterally put on hundreds of billion dollar tax. And yet on this, right, Donald Trump does have a sense, a political thermometer that he understands that, like, tax cuts for the rich are unpopular, that his base is increasingly not wealthy. And yet in this hilarious way, he kind of timidly floated the idea. As opposed to everything else, which is jump how high, I don’t care, get in line, we will primary you, what the hell are you talking about? On this core, sort of, almost sacramental part of the party, he has this hilarious post of, like, I think maybe they should consider it. I don’t know. Might hurt them, but kind of your call. And, ultimately, he backed down. Like, ultimately, that core ideological precept held.
Arjun Singh: Well, and it’s because even Trump is realizing how powerful the allure of tax cutting is for this party. And I would say it’s probably because many Republicans have openly acknowledged that tax cutting is all that this party is about. What we explore in the tax revolt series was actually an intentional decision during Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. He was sitting with his advisers after California had passed a ballot and measure to cap the property tax increases there, a landmark start of the modern tax revolt, and his advisers are debating, is this going to be the issue of our campaign? And this is a moment where Republicans felt that they were not in the majority. They’d been locked under Democratic liberal control despite that they had the presidency under Richard Nixon in the post-Watergate era, has completely upended what the party is about.
And we spoke with Art Laffer, who created something called the Laffer Curve. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a, fictitious is a fair word to honestly say about this, it’s a simple curve that claims that if you cut taxes, you’ll get so much economic productivity that you’ll recreate all of the tax gains that you have lost by cutting the taxes. It’s never proven true. But Art Laffer sits with Reagan, and he says tax cutting is going to be the thing. He sees the political popularity of it. And people like Jack Kemp, a New York congressman, say this is the issue, run on it.
Reagan becomes a tax cutter. And as Art Laffer told us, Reagan wasn’t always a pro tax cutting guy. I mean, he wanted a broad-based tax cut because Reagan was, I would describe him as more anti-government than necessarily a believer in the free market. And so he was happy to kind of kneecap government. But Laffer and these people really push him to say, make this the hallmark and signature of your presidency. And they do that, and you get to the point by 1992 when Dan Quayle is openly saying George H. W. Bush took away our one issue to run on, which is cutting taxes.
And so even in the party of Trump, I don’t think that this party does have a system around anything but raising taxes. Like you’ve mentioned, he’s upended so many things about it. But if they take away the tax cutting issue, it’s almost like they’ve taken away their legitimacy, and that’s not even to mention the amount of monetized entrenched interests that have bankrolled this party and their intellectual apparatuses, American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation. I mean, they’ve created not only a culture, but an intellectual fiefdom that you can’t really operate in this party without wanting to be unilaterally a tax cutter.
Chris Hayes: But here’s what’s so interesting to me is that entire intellectual apparatus used to be connected to a broader worldview about free markets, right? And Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” and Milton Friedman, “Free (sic) to Choose,” and this idea about, like, freedom. And freedom was always this watch (ph) for a smaller government. Cutting taxes is the means to the end of smaller government, which is an embodiment of a worldview in which we all have more freedom in our lives.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I’m not saying that that’s an accurate description of how things actually work. That was the story they were telling, a coherent story. Trump has ripped all that up. He does not care about freedom. He barely ever uses the word. In fact, he’s the opposite. He wants control. He refers to the American economy as if he is a shopkeeper who, quote, “sets the prices,” which is, like, the most, like, command and control central planning metaphor —
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — I’ve ever heard for an economy. Like, it is quite literally the opposite of a free market. And so what’s so fascinating to me is when you talk about that intellectual architecture, it wasn’t just an intellectual architecture on tax cuts. It was connected to a broader theory of the market and also a story about the market. Trump has just totally scrapped all that stuff. He’s presidential dictatorship where, like, I choose when I wake up on Tuesday what the tariff with Madagascar is going to be. And yet, again, the central part of it, the tax cutting has remained in the core there. My question to you is, how much is that tax cut pure political economy and cynicism? How much is it an ideological belief? How much is it a political belief that if we don’t do this, we won’t get elected? How you understand its centrality across those different axes.
Arjun Singh: Yeah. It’s a good question. I think it’s a complicated question because the Republican Party has become this kind of Frankenstein monster of all of the different components that you talked about. And so I do think that there is still a broad base amongst Republican elected officials, predominantly because they’re staffers. They’re sitting down at all these presentations at the right wing think tanks. So I do think that there is a significant amount of Republican elected officials who still do believe intellectually an idea that if you cut all the taxes, you’re going to unleash productivity.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Arjun Singh: You’ll hear your standard, I represent a district with a bunch of car dealerships and small businesses, and they’ll tell me, forgetting that the idea of a corporate tax on a multinational corporate is totally different from a small business tax. So that is certainly there. I do think too that because of this intentional effort from the Republican Party to equate taxes with, not just in a big government, but now a malicious government, this was something that had been there since the 1970s. Reagan has done it. But the idea that the government has become too liberal, too tolerant, they’re using your tax dollars to encourage integration, to encourage social equality, and so taxes became a part of the culture war.
When Newt Gingrich ran in 1978, his election that he wins first to the House, he picks up all of this stuff, and he creates an argument against hitting the IRS, because the IRS under Jimmy Carter was withholding tax exempt statuses from schools that were refusing to integrate themselves —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Arjun Singh: — which was following a court ruling. And the conservative movement at that time saw this as an issue. They saw taxation also as an issue, and they said fuse these together into what is basically an anti-government message.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Arjun Singh: And we show in the series that that was part of the proposition 13 ballot measure, the argument from some conservatives that people should not be letting their tax dollars be paying for school integration. Then Ronald Reagan dials that up even more when he talks about welfare queens and he cuts social services. And there, Reagan really tries to tie it to this economic argument, which is the welfare state is allowing people to not being productive and whatnot and whatnot. But, again, it’s really just an anti-government kind of approach, and he’s doing dog whistles to imply who are the welfare queens that he’s upset about. And then we get to Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan in the mid to late 90s who are now openly hostile to the government.
And when you look at it from there, of course, Donald Trump’s party is now doing DOGE and all of that. So that was a long-winded way of saying that I think that the cultural war that was part of the tax revolt has now embedded itself into the party that people who intellectually are on board with the tax cuts are also becoming liable to some of the cultural arguments about it. This idea that a welfare system encourages laziness. I think that’s kind of one of —
Chris Hayes: Oh, yeah.
Arjun Singh: — the most ridiculous things in and of itself because our welfare system doesn’t reasonably give you enough so that you could make —
Chris Hayes: Live high on the hog?
Arjun Singh: Yeah. Live high on the hog. I mean, to be honest, it’s a difficult process to commit this kind of fraud. And I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but that’s where I see it happening right now, to answer your question, is that I think it is a little bit of the intellectual thing, a little bit of the policy thing. But I think right now, it’s also a lot of the anti-government ideology that has overtaken it.
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Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: There’s two big things that have changed that I want to talk about over the trajectory that I think also challenge the potency. I mean, the potency of the popularity of the tax revolt. Right? I mean, one of the things we saw was the first in Trump’s first term, his lowest polling moment was when they were passing the Tax Cut and Jobs Act.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Until January 6, which is really striking, right? Like, think of how much stuff he did? How much crazy stuff he said. The lowest moment was this huge tax cut for the rich. So the popularity of it, like, it’s not the political winner that it might have been in Reagan. And I think there’s two things to think about. One is we should just level set here about taxation rates were so much higher when Reagan was cutting taxes.
Arjun Singh: Oh, absolutely.
Chris Hayes: And then they’ve been cut and cut and cut so that we just don’t pay that much in taxes anymore compared to what, particularly people at the top were paying —
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — under Reagan. And you see that reflect in the polling. When you ask people in the late 70s and 80s, are you taxed too high, too little, or just enough? Huge majorities were saying we’re taxed too high.
Arjun Singh: Right.
Chris Hayes: That number has come down over time. Like, it actually it’s not up there as a top complaint of people after all these tax cuts have happened, the way it was back then, right?
Arjun Singh: It’s absolutely true. The tax, I mean, that was the main argument in 1978 when conservatives rallied the public in California against property taxes. There was a very real economic crisis going on.
Chris Hayes: Taxes were really high.
Arjun Singh: Well, and also stagflation was happening.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Arjun Singh: The high unemployment and high inflation, a concept that people didn’t think was possible. And another interesting thing that was happening, Chris, is that after the New Deal really created a more robust government, by the 1960s, a lot of states are like, hey, we have all these new agencies, we have brand new professions that have been created just out of the New Deal, let’s start to organize some of this stuff. Let’s make it more professional. And what happened is in California, but also Massachusetts, Michigan, and New York, was they passed bills saying let’s modernize our tax system so that it’s centralized here in the state, and it’s professional. It’s that a real tax assessor goes, he or she measures the tax rate.
And it’s also an idea that it’s accountable. It’s not just some one person. We have an actual science and a system back there. But what was happening before that was you had county assessors who were elected officials, and so many of them electorally, and this is actually getting to, it’s a salient political issue when you just tell someone simply, I won’t make you pay more money.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Arjun Singh: So they were keeping tax assessments low. There was corruption that takes place. And so when all of this stuff kind of just gets fixed by modernization, it is a de facto tax increase.
Chris Hayes: Right, because you’ve got elected county assessors who are just like, it’s in their interest to keep your assessment slow. So you’re saying that when these states start to centralize assessment and make it actually, like, civil servant professional who comes out and a technocrat who says, like, this is the amount of property.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: This is the multiple. That was for people a real tax increase even though all they were paying was what they essentially should have been paying but hadn’t been. Got you.
Arjun Singh: Absolutely. And this is something and I will say that Republicans and conservatives have been very good at. They understood the messaging around this, which is Watergate has just happened. There are these corruption scandals, and, also, everyone’s pissed off at a Jimmy Carter government who they think is incompetent, not dealing with the crisis, not getting our hostages back from Iran, putting solar panels on the White House. That was the messaging around Jimmy Carter.
And they channel that into basically this angst and rage at federal bureaucrats, which swirls that the government’s bloated. It’s lazy. And why are you guys paying this unnecessary tax burden to fund all of this stuff? So they go for the most extreme of the measures that were proposed, and that was intentional. But, you’re right —
Chris Hayes: They, meaning in California, or at the federal level?
Arjun Singh: In California, they said, we’re going to do a hard cap of the property taxes. That was the most extreme conservative of the proposals, which was just a rubber stamp hard capping of this thing. And that was an intentional effort by some of the people pushing this to also defund the government a little bit. But you’re completely right, which is that at this period, not only property tax rates, federal tax rates were much higher, and we’ve seen massive cuts when Reagan came into office. The top rate going down from, I believe, it was in the mid-70s down to the high 30s, and it’s just gone down and down and down. And whenever Democratic administrations get in, they do, to their credit, try and raise that top marginal rate. But we’re talking 1% to 3% increases. I mean, Reagan did a double digit —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Arjun Singh: — dip.
Chris Hayes: It’s a one way ratchet, right? It’s easier —
Arjun Singh: It’s a one way ratchet, yeah.
Chris Hayes: It’s easier to cut a huge amount off the top. And then we have seen I mean, Clinton raised taxes on the top.
Arjun Singh: Yep.
Chris Hayes: Barack Obama did raise taxes on the top. And Joe Biden did raise taxes on the top.
Arjun Singh: Technically, H.W. did too.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. H.W. did too. Right? But, again, yes, those tend to be at the margins, much smaller than the cuts. The downward trajectory still is the downward trajectory.
Arjun Singh: Yeah. And the other thing that’s really interesting about this is that as the cuts have happened more and more, the public seems to generally still enjoy what the government provides for our society. I mean, the cuts have gone down so dramatically, not in tandem with disapproval of schools, of infrastructure, of social security, of Medicare and Medicaid. In fact, some of these programs have gotten even more popular as time has gone on. So, I don’t know if sometimes it’s completely put together that these tax cuts that are messaged as an individual thing are actually a broad-based means of eliminating the society a lot of Americans enjoy.
Chris Hayes: So that gets us to the tax bill now, right? Because the way that —
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — if you’re going to cut taxes, right, the government is going to make less revenue despite the Laffer Curve basically said, if tax rates are high enough, you cut them, you actually get more revenue in the aggregate.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: That has not happened in any of these tax cuts. It has actually produced less revenue. It’s produced greater deficits. In some cases, it’s produced way less revenue than even the projections.
Arjun Singh: I think Laffer would say the taxes are still too high. The curve just hasn’t hit its sweet spot. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So then you have a question of, like, okay. At the federal level, and now we’re talking about federal level, right? States have to balance their budgets, so that’s a different thing. They really do cut services when they cut taxes. They have to.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: The federal government can just increase deficits in borrowing. Generally, that’s the way it’s been done. These have been what’s called deficit finance tax cuts. And in some ways, from a political standpoint, like, that’s the sweet spot. I mean, honestly, like, if you could just cut a lot of taxes from people and not cut services people are like, well, like, sure, yeah, that sounds good. Right?
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Now, that’s only tenable in an environment in which your borrowing costs are relatively low and it doesn’t start to push up interest rates generally. We have been in one of those environments for a very long time, because the aftermath of the Great Recession, which has allowed enormous amounts of deficit financing with no real kind of macroeconomic knock on effects. That wasn’t the case in the 1990s where there were some more actual effects to deficits, right, on broader interest rates. We’re now in a period too where I think there’s a reason to think that, like, a huge deficit finance tax cut might actually have some real macroeconomic effects on interest rates —
Arjun Singh: Right.
Chris Hayes: — and increased borrowing costs generally. So now you have the Republicans, the big thing they’re going to cut is Medicaid.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And this brings us to the sort of second thing that I think has really changed in the last 45 years. In the same way that taxes have actually come down, which has taken some of the political potency out of the tax cut fervor, the coalitions have changed such that more and more Trump voters are on Medicaid, basically. They’re either on Medicaid or Medicaid adjacent. And so you’re seeing Josh Hawley, very, very conservative senator from Missouri, writing a don’t cut Medicaid op ed. You see all the frontline members really worried about Medicaid cuts. How has the change of the actual demographic and class composition of the Republican Party, you think, since Norquist and Reagan changed how they think about all this?
Arjun Singh: I think it’s making a huge impact on how they’re looking at this right now, because, you mentioned Josh Hawley, and I read his op ed in “The New York Times” about not cutting Medicaid, but I think even on the lower level of elected officials, they’re hearing firsthand from their constituents right now that we really do rely on these services. There was a TikTok video that was going around that I thought was actually very salient, which was a Trump voter, when he did the payment freeze and said, I’m going to shut everything down, she was distraught because she didn’t realize her SNAP payments were also part of that.
And I think in one way, this is actually the benefit of, you work in the media, I work in the media, we have a totally crazy broken media ecosystem that’s not been that great. But I do think what’s different now is actually you’re seeing a lot more people being able to connect the dots between the things that they experience in their lives and what’s happening on federal policy. So, back in the 90s, you could have marketed at a tax cut and said I’m saving your taxes. Bill Clinton, the president, he was the one who signed the bill that cut your aids or cut your welfare programs and whatnot. And there are a lot of politicians that were unethical about messaging like that.
Now I think that it’s impossible for these officials to not hear from their constituents who know that the Trump decisions are the reasons they might not get Medicaid. It might be the reasons that their SNAP funding might run out, even things as housing assistance. And what’s ironic is that with the coalition changes, the Republicans are starting to realize why the Democrats were such an electoral party of what I prefer the term the administrative state to anything that they’ve said before because the Democrats came about during the era of the New Deal, and if they knew their history, all of these Republican senators’ constituents are the New Deal bedrocks.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Arjun Singh: The New Deal was created to help rural predominantly white Americans. And we have a different diverse country now, but because of that coalition change, I think the Republicans are realizing we do have to take this more seriously. But I’ll just end on one thing is that the Republicans have always tried to have this both ways. I mean, Reagan ballooned the deficit because he wanted all of his defense spending —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Arjun Singh: — and he wanted to increase that. Trump wants to build his border wall. He still wants to build his border wall. They still want to buy all the drones, all the Palantir technology, all the Amazon Web Services technology to run their camps.
Chris Hayes: A trillion dollar Pentagon budget and I think a three to five-fold, 500% —
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — increase to DHS —
Arjun Singh: Yeah. I mean, George W. Bush slashed all the taxes and then said, let me do one of the most expensive and, like, horrific things ever and launch two devastating wars. And —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Arjun Singh: So this is something that Republicans have just always been like even since they become the tax cutting party. I think now they just can’t electorally pretend that they’re not because they have to either raise the debt ceiling or cut some of these services. And now they’re realizing what it’s like to govern with a majority.
Chris Hayes: Okay. I want to zoom in on that, because I think there’s actually something more here. When you talk about Reagan and welfare queen, right?
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: He’s talking about a specific woman. In fact, Josh Levin wrote a great series for Slate and then I think a book about her. It’s an actual woman, right? She was a black woman from a city, right?
Arjun Singh: Yes.
Chris Hayes: So this whole idea was, the kind of racial and class politics of the tax revolt was this, they tax you and give your money to them.
Arjun Singh: Sure.
Chris Hayes: Okay? That was like, you, being white, middle class homeowner, them, being non-white, inner city, quote, “underclass” welfare queens and people on food stamps. And that was very potent. It was very racially loaded, and it was class loaded. It had a lot of intense us versus them populism to it. It is just an objective empirical fact that the Republican coalition under Trump is increasingly working class. And lower socioeconomic status. And one thing that I think is so interesting is what has happened to Medicaid. Here’s what I would say. Social Security and Medicare are the big cornerstones of American social democracy that we have. Right?
Social insurance, and it’s a middle class entitlement, everyone has it. Everyone who gets over 65, everyone gets Social Security. And that has meant it has been insulated from being tainted as a thing for them. SNAP, which is for poor folks, so they can eat, and Medicaid, which is also for poor folks and people one rung above what’s officially poor, have been much easier to demagogue. Like, those poor people, they’re shiftless, and they won’t work, and they’re getting free stuff from the government. It is so interesting to me that the politics of Medicaid have moved from the politics of kind of welfare food stamps, like some free stuff from the government other people get, I’m talking about, like, conservative rhetoric, to wait a second, our people get that. And there was a quote by one Republican congressman whose name is escaping me right now who literally said something along the lines of, the White House has to understand it’s not some other people who get Medicaid, it’s our people. Steve Bannon said, a lot of MAGA on Medicaid. So, all of a sudden now, you’ve got this thing, Medicaid, and this is partly because the Obamacare expansion, that has migrated from a thing you could go after and be confident it was just the welfare queens who were going to be screwed to something much more like Medicare and Social Security, and that’s exactly the political problem they’re now facing in Congress. Arjun Singh: Oh, absolutely. And I didn’t know if the rep you were talking about was David Valadao, but David Valadao is this very interesting representative from California. And he has spoken out against the Trump plan, particularly because he says a lot of people in my district rely on this. And he’s trying to say this is not a politically salient issue for us anymore. The other thing that is not salient for them that I would be very concerned about if I were in the Republican Party is you have a razor thin, I would hesitate to even call it a majority, in the House of Representative. You have, like, a couple extra bodies who may or may not vote on your bills. But where are the biggest Republican gains that they were able to cut in are California, on New York, a state like Florida. I mean, these are three states that one of which, is a Republican state but has a lot of people that rely on these programs like you were talking about.
The other two are states where the political culture is a little bit more amenable to these kinds of programs. The Medicaid programs, I could speak to California. That’s where I grew up. It’s branded after the state program, so it’s not necessarily known to some people as this big federal program. And so, people inside the state, if they see this getting cut because of Trump’s actions, they’re like, what’s wrong with the Medicaid program that I get from the state? I know we hate the federal programs, but what’s wrong with this program?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Arjun Singh: So, it really is politically dangerous even for just your sitting current House members over there. But I don’t know, Chris, how they’re going to square this circle. I mean, the Republicans were the country club party. And Pat Buchanan’s run didn’t seem to rejigger the Republican Party. I mean, they still came out with George W. Bush, a nepo baby, an ivy league graduate –
Chris Hayes: Right.
Arjun Singh: — who kind of just was a rehash of Ronald Reagan and Grover Norquist and thought he was a little bit like his dad. But Trump is kind of the first one who’s trying to push this party really into the deep democratic coalition, labor unions, low income people. So, I don’t see how the Republicans honestly get out of this, unless the Republicans agree to change their orthodoxy, which is to promote the administrative state, to raise the debt ceiling. But that is going to have to require a whole of sale admission —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Arjun Singh: — that you need that. And what do you do when you have major donors like the Scaife family or the Kochs who are anti-government donors? You can’t say you want a bigger government in that way.
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Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So there’s a bunch of different parts of this coalition that all have to fit together. And this is, we should say, majority coalitions always have these tensions. You’d rather have those tensions than be in the minority. Like, the nature of being in a majority coalition is you’re bigger and you have tension. So, one of them is you’ve got this increasingly sort of working class, even working poor, poor folks that are Trump voters who depend on things like SNAP and Medicaid. So that’s one problem. We should talk about this. Then you’ve got the folks in California and New York and New Jersey, particularly, who are in frontline districts, who represent classic kind of upper middle class suburban tax revolt on this issue of the state and local tax deduction.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Which was, in the first Trump tax cut, they ended up taking away this deduction from folks who are upper middle class and wealthy, affluent, who pay a ton in high tax states in state and local taxes. Formerly, you could take that off your federal income tax, which is thousands, tens of thousands of dollars. And it was like they raised those people’s taxes by, in some cases, tens of thousands, in some cases, like hundreds of thousands of dollars, right?
Arjun Singh: Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: The people that represent those districts who took it on the chin are adamant that their number one issue is getting that back in.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Right? This is the Long Island folks, the Westchester folks in New York, the Orange County folks in California. And, again, I think they’re wrong on the policy. I think I’ve come to think they’re wrong on the policy, but they’re representing their districts decently well.
Arjun Singh: Right. Right.
Chris Hayes: That, to me, is a real tough thing too, because that’s a place where they really do have, like, old school kind of, like, tax revolt ferocity on their side.
Arjun Singh: Oh, absolutely.
Chris Hayes: Where, like, they really do represent people who truly took it on the chin, like, really saw their taxes get hiked —
Arjun Singh: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — under the last administration, who they have been promising they’re going to cut for them.
Arjun Singh: Yeah. Well, the other funny thing about the SALT fight is that it almost seemed like it was, like, Trump and maybe some of the GOP’s way of, like, needling the people in the blue states that they really —
Chris Hayes: Oh, totally. Yes.
Arjun Singh: — didn’t like. And, of course —
Chris Hayes: This has been Norquist’s long idea, because what he wants to do is he wants to screw affluent blue state folks because he wants them to not tolerate high local state taxes.
Arjun Singh: Yes. Yes. Absolutely. You’re right. That’s like the original OG style of tax revolt —
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
Arjun Singh: — which is, like, listen, we’re getting unfairly burdened. And I think the argument for the proponents of SALT outside of the political is that they’re saying it’s a seesaw effect, which is, like, our taxes go up, then they go back down. And so, I agree with you that the merits of it might be something worth debating, but that is a clear conflict within the Republican coalition.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Arjun Singh: And we haven’t talked about the Democrats of it yet, but this could be an opportunity. If you take the political salience of just taxes right now, people are still upset about their tax burden. But as the series we talk about, so much of this is how you talk about taxation and how you talk about that.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Arjun Singh: And I almost wonder for the Democrats if the tax revolt was born out of the idea of bloated government, ineffective government, mean government, the Democrats could reasonably come back and just say, look, we’re just about good governance at this point.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Arjun Singh: We’re not going to seesaw your tax rate. If we’re going to implement a tax cut, it’s going to be targeted and make sense. I mean, I’ve been reading, Julian Zelizer’s, first assessment books about the various presidents, really great history essays. And he has one about the first assessment of Barack Obama written in 2018. When they talk about the decision to extend the Bush tax cuts for lower and middle class people. Now I’m not defending, I don’t want to get an economic point to say, like, this is right or this is wrong. But I think you see actually a very interesting difference between how a Ronald Reagan approach is just do all the broad-based tax cuts, the deficits be damned, to an Obama who actually tries to approach this as saying a tax cut as a policy, who to work for stimulus for some people.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Arjun Singh: Not multimillionaires and not multibillionaires. And that kind of got lost in the devil and the details, is that —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Arjun Singh: — Obama almost faced similar as, like, in H.W., like, when he campaigned again. It’s like, well, you extended the Bush tax cuts. But also you didn’t go far enough on certain things. So, I do think, like, the Republicans, I truly don’t know how you square all these circles unless you just flat out come out and say things like, it’s not a broad-based principle. It’s just this. It’s just politics. But the Democrats, I think, have an opportunity to really come back and just say, look, we understand how tax policy works and what taxes do, and we’re just going to try and be responsible about it.
Chris Hayes: I mean, I don’t think there’s a single Democrat who feels pressure about this bill —
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — because of the Medicaid cuts and because of the cuts to top earners. I mean —
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I mean, I think every single member of the party can go up to the floor tomorrow and vote against it and say, I’m voting against Medicaid cuts. I’m voting against a tax cut for the rich for Medicaid cuts. Like, it’s an easy issue for them. The harder issue is getting the Republican votes. And, like, the other thing I’ll say about the Democrats on the SALT thing, it’s not just that they can actually get to the right in some ways. They can get to the tax revolt side of these numbers and be like, the Republicans raised your taxes. Like, they raised your taxes. And if they don’t undo it, they’re going to screw you again. Like, they have an actual tax revolt case to make.
Arjun Singh: Yes.
Chris Hayes: In those districts, particularly, LaLota’s district, Mike Lawler’s district. I know those two districts well in New York. Then there’s a third aspect of this too. So you’ve got the, like, frontline suburban seats that want their SALT deduction back in. You’ve got huge, vast numbers of MAGA voters and MAGA representatives, Derek Van Orden, for instance, in the Driftless Region, Wisconsin, which is just name one, who’ve got lots of folks on Medicaid.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Right? And then you’ve got the whole K Street lobbying infrastructure/ideological wealthy donor apparatus that has been creating the beast, the Norquist tax cut beast, for 40 years, that are also not going to go quietly. Like, when one way to square those circles, right, if you were going to try to get the revenue was to be like, fine, we’ll raise taxes on top earners.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And then we can get the SALT deduction back in. We could reduce the Medicaid cuts. Everyone’s happy, except then you walk across the line of the Koch brothers, Mellon Scaife, the entire intellectual architecture you guys talk about in the series that’s built up around tax cuts for rich people.
Arjun Singh: Yeah. I think if the Republican Party has to make a very clear decision right now, which is that they were a party predicated on a very simplistic and they’re seeing the blowback of the simplistic strategy of we’re just going to cut all of the taxes. They’ve allowed these big donors to come in. And I think this issue is solved if you are Trump and you say, all right, we are going to make this a class issue-based party, and it’s about the elites and it’s about everybody else.
Democrats have certainly struggled internally about how they want to propose that, but this is such like, how does the Republican Party transform from the country club Republican Party to being the populist warrior party that I think Trump clearly sees himself in, that people like Steve Bannon are, and that for better or for worse, his administration has been stuffed with a lot of the cronies from previous administrations, a lot of the hyper capitalists. He has a lot of true believers around him too who really genuinely think that MAGA is a populist movement fighting back.
I mean, I read columns in outlets, pseudo conservative outlets who don’t want to say that they’re MAGA, but they approach this sort of populist conservatism saying it needs to be a class-based issue. So that is something that you can do, but it completely blows up what this party is. And I don’t think those donors are going to be okay with that.
Chris Hayes: I mean, we’ve already seen the test so far because Bannon said, we got all these articles about how they’re considering raising taxes on the rich, which, again, would solve those problems I’m talking about, right? You can go get some more revenue, and then you can pay off these other parts of the coalition you need, right?
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Reduce your Medicaid cuts. Get some SALT relief back in there. They floated it. Multiple articles are considering it. Bannon saying they should do it, right? Bannon’s like, sure. Then Trump, like, says he he’s for it. He announces he’s for it.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: In the end, though, it’s not in the bill.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It is not in the bill. Like, to the extent that, like, there’s any real populism here in the sense of, like, the political economy, the distributional effects of Republican tax bills, it’s not here.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I mean, they failed the test, is my point.
Arjun Singh: Yeah. No. I agree with you, and I don’t think that it is a realistic viable pathway. And to be honest, I think that a bit of the swing you saw amongst working class voters, and this has been an ongoing debate and discussion, but I am, Chris, starting to come around a little bit more that it might be a reflection more of Democratic failures in the election than it was a salient, strong Republican Party in their message. And it was a change election of just wanting a rejection of the status quo. And the reason I think that now is that when you look at a lot of the things the Biden presidency had done, those were things that respondents in polls all say they wanted to see more of. They wanted to see infrastructure get fixed. They wanted to see better funding for things like education. And things like the climate change initiatives, I saw a couple interesting polls. One was from Gallup. There’s another one from Pew. People saw when it was framed to them as infrastructure, they were much more on board with it than if you said climate change mitigation, green energy, whatever. And so I think a lot of the public actually appreciates what the Democrats had been doing, and Republicans are just going to have to, I mean, you just can’t square this circle.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Although, remember, I mean, one of the lessons I think that they took away from the first time they did this, which is that the Tax Cut and Jobs Act was very unpopular.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And they lost the House, but they were going to lose the House anyway. And then everyone kind of forgot about it, and they got away with it. Like, they need to keep, what, four or five votes from defecting.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Right? I think they have four or five they can let go. I still think they’ll be able to pull it off. I think it will be bad for them politically, but ultimately it’s not going to be catastrophic. They’ll pay the price for it, but it’ll be worth it to them to get their tax cuts.
Arjun Singh: Absolutely.
Chris Hayes: We end up where we begin. The other thing, the last part of this that we have to enter into the equation here —
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — which is a fascinating part of this, when you’re thinking about the math of this tax bill. Right? So, like, we’ve talked about this triangle where it’s, like, frontline members in SALT, Medicaid cuts, then you’ve got the kind of entire K Street lobbying apparatus, Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, wealthy donors, ideological intensity of we cut taxes for rich people, right? And rich people have a lot of resources, and they’re being lobbied on. There’s all sorts of stuff that’s going to be in that bill that’s not even just the top headline rate. It’s going to be —
Arjun Singh: Right.
Chris Hayes: — ways that rich people can gain the system. They’re getting rid of IRS enforcement, all that stuff.
Arjun Singh: We actually found something today in the bill that they’re reducing the tax rates for silencers on weapons.
Chris Hayes: I love this. This is one of the little ones. Yes. If you buy a silencer, there’s, like, a federal fee you pay —
Arjun Singh: Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — basically, that they’re going to get rid of. So, like, it’ll be cheaper to buy silencers.
Arjun Singh: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: Because like, obviously, hitmen are people —
Arjun Singh: Of course. I saw that movie by Richard Linklater. It was a tough job.
Chris Hayes: But the last part of this that is also kind of a funny part of the math is that Donald Trump made a bunch of tax cut pledges in the campaign.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: That were, I would say, kind of broadly populist, in that, it was no taxes on overtime, it was no taxes on Social Security.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And no taxes, famously, on tips. Now, as tax policy, none of these make a lot of sense.
Arjun Singh: No.
Chris Hayes: In fact, they’re bad policy. You want to not distinguish between different types of income. You want to tax income and then just have your rates. It makes no sense whatsoever. No taxes on tips is a profoundly idiotic idea.
Arjun Singh: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Because it incentivizes the worst form of compensation, which is the, like, voluntary largesse of people. Everyone hates all the tipping prompts on machines. Everyone hates that now.
Arjun Singh: Well, and the other thing that it didn’t do, Chris, I was a bartender for, like, eight years, before I got into journalism, as I was going to be into journalism. Bad business owners that collect all the tips and then pay income to their staff, it is a giveaway to all of those people for abuse in the industry.
Chris Hayes: Not only that. Think about, I haven’t gone through the legislative language yet. But how many financial firms are going to start gratuity-based compensation?
Arjun Singh: Oh, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like, if you’re going to say this is a tax free avenue to pay people, all of a sudden, you are going to create this enormous loophole.
Arjun Singh: Yep.
Chris Hayes: But, so everyone who knows tax policy knows this is a dumb idea, and yet Trump is insisting, and it’s a very expensive idea, particularly the Social Security and overtime. So that’s another part of the circle they have to square, which is they could also just ditch that stuff overboard because it’s both bad policy and it’s super expensive in the bill —
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — but they can’t because it’s Trump’s ideas. He won’t let them.
Arjun Singh: I have to say, I love kind of the bitter pill that they have to swallow of Trump’s ideas actually becoming reality and fruition. And look the story with, like, Trump is, I hate to say it, but he pushes the weirdest things, and somehow everyone’s so scared, and then it comes through. But I think another thing that that reveals and kind of gets to is that the way that tax policy is discussed has really been controlled by the Republicans, which is that taxes —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Arjun Singh: — are very much discussed as a means of something being taken away from you.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Arjun Singh: And when I talked to Grover Norquist, I heard a really interesting story. Our producer, Ariella Markowitz, told me that when he was a kid, his dad would, like, take him out for ice cream and then take bites out of the cone and say that’s taxes and give them to him. And I’ve met other people who’ve kind of had these similar radicalizing stories. Oh, my parents took away my toys, and they told me that’s what taxes are all about. We talk about them as things that are taken away, and rarely do we talk about them as things that are paid for or provided for. And I know a lot of the Democrats tried to, but this is what Trump is really trying to frame it as, is he saw political constituencies. He saw servers and probably had some adviser that was like —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Arjun Singh: — tell him no taxes on tips. That’s your base. It’s going to go there. And, sure, as a political tool, if you need to catch some constituency, yeah, tell everyone you’re not going to make them pay taxes. But welcome to the reality of our country fundamentally likes this government. They might not like the people who run it. They might not like everything about it, but they don’t want to see it get defunded. And we haven’t really talked about DOGE, but I think that was the other can of worms Trump has now opened because Elon Musk has pushed the message that the tax cuts into Medicaid and stuff are necessary according to his —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Arjun Singh: — fancy DOGE, and this thing they’ve built up to be so intelligent and savvy, well, now that guy’s saying cut into your core political constituency.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Arjun Singh: So —
Chris Hayes: Old school, right wing, wealthy austerity, like —
Arjun Singh: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — like, Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. Everyone’s a fraudster. These people are sitting on their dust. Like, it’s very, very throwback.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It’s not populist. It’s the opposite in some ways.
Arjun Singh: Yes, it’s a great way of putting it. It’s not actually a populist way, despite what feels very populist, framing it around freedom. But you know what? What about the freedom to not have a giant rich corporation beat me up because I have no choice but to buy the food that they sell?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Arjun Singh: What’s the freedom of allowing Walmart to get so big, it destroyed all the mom and pop general stores and grocery stores that, when I was growing up, I was told are the, quote, unquote, “backbone of Main Street” in America. So we talk about taxation as a means of limiting freedom, but what about all the freedoms that are taken from us because now the government doesn’t do its job?
Chris Hayes: Well, and this relates to something that has been a real problem for the Democrats, which is the way that they sort of diffused the tax revolt is every Democratic politician I’ve ever seen says, we will not raise taxes on middle class people. They will raise taxes on the rich, and they genuinely do try to do it, but they won’t raise taxes on middle class people.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: But, of course, taxes on middle class people are how you get big, middle class social insurance like —
Arjun Singh: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — middle class taxes are how you fund Social Security. Middle class taxes are how you fund Medicare. Middle class taxes are how other countries fund national health insurance. So, like, when Bernie Sanders was like, here’s my Medicare for all, the two big attacks on it are you won’t be able to choose your health care provider, right, to limit your choice, and your taxes will go up. And he would say, yeah, your taxes are going to go up, but your health care costs are going to go down.
Arjun Singh: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: And for most people, that’s right, and that’s a fair trade.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: But Norquist’s big accomplishment is, in terms of extending the social safety net in America, in terms of sort of creating a more robustly social democratic vision, if you want to do things like care, for instance, it’s very hard and tricky to make those things happen just by taxing the rich.
Arjun Singh: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like, the way that other social democratic countries that have lower levels of inequality and bigger services work is that they just have higher taxes on middle class people.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And that has basically been taken off the table politically in the U.S. Arjun Singh: Yes. It’s something that I thought about so much when I was making this series that as much as this is sure the Republican story of tax cutting, the Democrats and liberals are caught in a place too where they don’t want to acknowledge that. And I think back to when I covered politics in Massachusetts, a super liberal Democratic state, I would talk to sources on the campaigns. This is Democrat versus Democrat, and they would flummox themselves over trying to answer the tax question. And I’m sort of like, well, we live in Massachusetts. I mean, why? But the idea of being on record of saying I will raise x person’s taxes is an (inaudible). And I think that’s one of the troubles Democrats have gotten themselves into, which is that, like you were saying, they want to try and figure out how to sometimes keep cutting taxes for the middle class, but the middle class should and is the biggest part of our country. So they’re going to be who drives these taxes. So I think the discussion should be more about, yes, taxing rich, but also tax havens and all of the different tools that have been put in place to hide your money everywhere else and defunding the IRS. These are things that I think happen in the background when we don’t talk as much about the broad tax issue, and we talk about it very specifically as taxes go up versus taxes go down.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Arjun Singh: You could actually get a lot of tax revenue if you just cleaned up the tax code and you brought in enforcement officers. The Republicans want to build, they want to use in the same reconciliation bill to build the rest of the wall and increase stuff at DHS. Why don’t you increase funding at the IRS and just get rid of half these loopholes and deductions and order the IRS and say, you need to go after all these guys. And the reason is, as we reported at the Lever that Billy Long, Trump’s pick for the IRS, recently had a lot of debt paid off for him by a ridiculous group of wealthy donors.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And they’ve also demagogued that the Biden administration did fund the IRS. They did put a huge amount more in enforcement. You could look at the chart, it really does go up. Like, they actually did do it. It also generated more revenue as the CBO had predicted.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like, it did all the things, and that was a huge demagogic bludgeon for Republicans. Right? Like, the armed IRS agents that are coming come to your home. So that was a place where, I think, cleverly, a Democratic administration tried to kind of thread that needle. Right?
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: We’re only raising taxes on the rich, but we’re going to generally increase enforcement and close off tax cheating.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And I think it was relatively effective. I don’t think it really cost them that much. I don’t think there was a huge bite in that. But, again, the idea of raising taxes on the middle class for large middle class entitlements for middle class social insurance remains a kind of third rail —
Arjun Singh: Yeah. Chris Hayes: — and is a very difficult thing to happen. Of course, as we’re having this conversation, I should say when we’re having it, it’s on May 14th when, like a day after the first markup of this bill.
Arjun Singh: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It’s going to be really fascinating. I mean, I think this gives a good sense of how, like, the ideological political economy, coalitional effects of MAGA, like, all are in this very, very tense fight with each other, and it’s going to be really interesting to see how this all gets resolved.
Arjun Singh: Yeah. I mean, you have a Republican Party that has had really this one issue as their unifying issue. So what we talk about in the series is that anti-communism for a long time was the biggest defining issue of Republican Party. You have these splintering coalitions always there. They’re kind of always at the embers. Mitt Romney was getting bitten by the fringe conservatives when he was running. And now you’ve kind of taken the tax cutting thing off the table because they’re realizing we don’t have this issue anymore. I think that Trump hopes that his own central force of gravity is powerful enough —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Arjun Singh: — to continue to overtake this.
Chris Hayes: That’s the bet (ph).
Arjun Singh: And I have to wonder if Mitch McConnell is sitting there cynically hoping to get the last laugh because he is the party of the tax cutter.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Arjun Singh: I mean, that was his era of Republican Party.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Arjun Singh: And that’ll be great and curious to see. Is the tax cutting issue the one issue that even Donald Trump can’t conquer?
Chris Hayes: Arjun Singh is co-host and senior producer of the “Lever Time” podcast, lead reporter and editor of the Tax Revolt mini-series they put out, and he’s been covering the tax fight on Capitol Hill. Arjun, thanks a lot. It was great.
Arjun Singh: Thanks for having me, Chris.
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