Congressional Democrats voted in lockstep against the 2017 tax reform and relief bill, a signature accomplishment of the first Trump administration. They argued that the measure was a giveaway to “millionaires and billionaires,” while ludicrously describing it as “Armageddon” for families. Based on their parade-of-horribles messaging, they conditioned working- and middle-class people to expect tax increases, followed by an economic collapse. In reality, the overwhelming majority of taxpayers across all income groups received a tax cut, thanks to the across-the-board provisions actually in the law. And in the latter portion of Trump’s first term, up until COVID-19 shut the world down with black swan disruptions, the U.S. economy was cooking with gas, meeting with solid approval from voters.
In the first year of Trump’s second term, congressional Republicans voted to make the 2017 tax cuts permanent, thus preventing a punishing, multitrillion-dollar tax hike from slamming millions of households and businesses alike. The GOP may not get much gratitude or credit from the electorate for doing so, but ruinous and broad-based tax increases, right on the heels of years of painful inflation, would have been catastrophic. Their action, unanimously opposed by Democrats, spared the country even more economic harm. That is a significant accomplishment. In the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, now the law of the land, not only were those previous lower rates extended, but additional tax relief was enacted. Trump’s famous “no tax on tips or overtime” sloganeering became law. In spite of this policy targeted squarely at working people, Democrats predictably pilloried the proposal as Republicans doing the bidding of ‘the rich’ — a trope they flog, regardless of its applicability to the policy itself.
