President Donald Trump said he wouldn’t mind paying more in taxes himself, but he’s not entirely convinced that congressional Republicans should raise taxes on millionaires.
“Well, I’ll tell ya, I certainly don’t mind having a tax increase,” Trump told Time Magazine in a wide-ranging interview published on Friday.
Trump said the reason he is hesitant about such a policy is because of how much political heat President George H.W. Bush took for agreeing to a deal with congressional Democrats that violated his pledge to, “Read my lips: no new taxes.”
Unlike many fellow Republicans, Trump said he supported the general concept of forcing the wealthy to pay more to benefit the middle class.
“I’d be raising them on wealthy to take care of middle class. And that’s—I love, that,” Trump said. “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, especially with the fake news.”
According to Time, Trump made his comments on Tuesday. A day later, it appeared the president had drastically changed his tune on the subject.
“I think it would be very disruptive, because a lot of the millionaires would leave the country,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday. “The old days, they left states. They go from one state to the other. Now with transportation so quick and so easy, they leave countries.”
Trump said the US would “lose a lot of money” if it raised taxes on millionaires.
“And other countries that have done it have lost a lot of people,” he said. “They lose their wealthy people. That would be bad, because the wealthy people pay the tax.”
A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request to explain the apparent discrepancy in Trump’s comments.
Republicans on Capitol Hill are reportedly considering raising taxes on the highest earners to help cover the cost of Trump’s sweeping tax cut and immigration legislation, which the president has called his one “big, beautiful bill.” Republicans are using a special procedural power that would allow them to pass the bill without the support of a single Democratic vote. It also means that with slim majorities in both houses, Trump and Republican leaders can only afford to lose a few votes.
Trump’s previous tax returns show that he has paid little in federal taxes in many years. Over his strong objections, House Democrats in 2022 publicly released six years’ worth of Trump’s returns. The documents showed that Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2017 and no tax in 2020. Some of the details of Trump’s returns were previously revealed by The New York Times, which obtained over two decades of Trump’s financial data. According to the Times, Trump paid $0 in income tax in 10 of the 15 years before he was first elected as president.
Trump’s fortune has grown considerably since then. Forbes estimates his real-time net worth to be $5.2 billion, almost entirely attributable to his trust’s stake in the parent company of Truth Social, the social network he launched after leaving office.
Former White House advisor Steve Bannon, who remains close to Trump, previously said he was for raising taxes, even the corporate tax rate.
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“I’m for a dramatic increase in corporate taxes,” Bannon recently told Semafor. “We have to increase taxes on the wealthy.”
