In early 2019, Donald Trump spoke at the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual convention and delivered a specific boast about the estate tax. “We got rid of it, folks,” the president said.
Like so many of his claims, this wasn’t true. The Republicans’ 2017 package of tax breaks narrowed the eligibility of who would be affected by the estate tax, but GOP policymakers did not, in fact, “get rid of it.”
They are, however, getting closer to that goal. The Washington Post reported:
Under current law, estates pay tax only on transfers above $13.99 million for single filers and $27.98 million for married couples. Those thresholds, doubled by President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law, are scheduled to fall by roughly half at the end of 2025. But in the tax bill before Congress, both the House and Senate versions would raise the exemption starting next year to $15 million for individuals and $30 million for couples, then set them to adjust for inflation in the future.
When policymakers, concerned about the societal impact of dynastic wealth, initially approved an estate tax nearly nine decades ago, it only affected 0.9% of American estates. As the Post’s report noted, by 2019, that figure was down to 0.08%, and GOP officials are determined to use their party’s domestic policy megabill — the inaptly named One Big Beautiful Bill Act — to shield even more hyper-wealthy estates.
The cost of this tax cut would be roughly $210 billion, all of which would benefit no one but the very wealthy.
A related report in The Wall Street Journal noted, “The estate tax cuts are a boon for the richest in a bill that has already received criticism for aiding the wealthy at the expense of low-income people.”
It’s a key detail. According to independent budget estimates, the Republican reconciliation package is already slated to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, redistributing wealth in the wrong direction, and it’s against this backdrop that GOP lawmakers thought it’d be a good idea to include a $210 billion tax break that would exclusively benefit the wealthiest families in the country.
In recent years, I’ve lost count of how many times Republican officials, insiders, pundits and strategists have said that the GOP is undergoing a Trump-era transformation, becoming less of a corporate party and more of a blue-collar party. Indeed, I’m occasionally reminded of a claim Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas made in 2021 when he claimed, “The Republican Party is not just the party of country clubs. The Republican Party is the party of steel workers, construction workers, pipeline workers, police officers, firefighters, waiters and waitresses.”
It was nice rhetoric, I suppose, though it hardly reflects reality. The Trump-led GOP is championing legislation that would leave struggling families significantly worse off, while shielding the generational wealth of millionaires and billionaires.
To believe that Republicans have become a “working-class party” is to ignore everything the party is actually doing with their power.
