Tax Revolt: Arjun Singh on the Roots of Trump’s Push for Massive $4.5 Trillion Tax Cut for the Rich

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

The Republican plan to slash taxes on the rich, to talk about it, we’re joined in Washington, D.C., by The Lever’s Arjun Singh, senior producer, co-host of the podcast Lever Time, which has a series called “Tax Revolt” about the history of the Republican anti-tax movement. This is a trailer for the series.

ARIELLA MARKOWITZ: From the landmark California tax revolt to Trump’s latest push to cut taxes for the rich, this movement claimed to fight for the average American but really deepened inequality and helped the rich get richer.

ARJUN SINGH: This is the story of how a small but powerful movement reshaped our economy, weakened our democracy and left the government scrambling to serve the people it was meant to protect.

ART LAFFER: But that’s not the way the world is, guys. Do you want to sit there and scream and holler and hate rich people and lose every election?

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN: It is time for a wealth tax in America.

ART LAFFER: You’ll lose everything. If you don’t lose the election, you’ll lose the country. So, there, you got it. You with me?

AMY GOODMAN: That is a trailer for this series “Tax Revolt” about the history of the Republican anti-tax movement.

The Lever’s Arjun Singh joins us now.

Thanks, Arjun, for being with us. If you can give us the history about what we’re seeing? While many call this the big, beautiful bill — the Republicans in Congress, of course, President Trump, who visited them yesterday to try to bring together all the parties to pass this — others are simply calling it the billionaires’ tax cut bill. Explain where this comes from.

ARJUN SINGH: Thanks for having me, Amy. It’s great to be with you.

This bill is really the culmination of a long-standing effort of the Republican Party to pull together different coalitions that really don’t have a lot in common except for being united under the banner of the anti-tax movement. In the 1970s, the Republican Party was trying to build a base out of anti-communism and being fervently anti-communist, but this was a bipartisan thing. So, in 1978, after a California ballot election where conservative activists convinced Californians to cap the property tax rate, Republicans realized that tax cutting could be a very powerful force for uniting different groups that may not seem to be bedfellows with each other.

And so, you have different coalitions in there. You have billionaires, of course, who want their tax cuts. You have business interests, who want to be able to game the tax code. But then you also have members of the Republican base, people who are legitimately anti-government in that they believe that there should be no government or an incredibly limited form of government potentially kicked down to the states. And then you have other people who see the government as a tool of ideology that they don’t agree with.

And so, starting with the Reagan era and into the 1990s and now, of course, in the Trump, you have a very strong coalition of Republicans who genuinely believe that the government has been hijacked by an ideological force. They believe it’s become too tolerant and too liberal. And so, they see the tax issue as a means of actually defunding an entire federal government that they completely hate. The other parts of the coalition are people who are deficit hawks, and they have an ideological hatred of deficit spending.

And so, this coalition that Trump is trying to pull together is trying to please everybody. But what’s awkward about this is that Trump himself has created an awkward part of the coalition that relies on a lot of government services. And what you’re seeing now with his efforts to cut Medicaid, Elon Musk and DOGE, is that a lot of parts of the Republican base right now not only rely on these services, they like these services. And there’s no way you can please this coalition. Either you have to raise the debt ceiling, which the deficit hawks do not want, or you have to acknowledge that the government services are vital, and figure out a funding mechanism. President Trump has proposed, and then he walked it back, raising taxes on millionaires, showing the strength of the anti-tax movement. Or you raise taxes, and you find a functioning government.

But what Trump is trying to figure out right now is: How do you pull all these people together? They have very few votes. And it looks like they’re not going to be able to pull it together. Maybe things can happen at the last hour, but currently they are very much in a fight. And this is the culmination of that effort to glue together a really strange coalition that, in many ways, does not get along.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, Arjun, for your series on The Lever, you also interviewed Grover Norquist, the head of the conservative advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform. What did he tell you? And why is he such an important figure?

ARJUN SINGH: So, Grover Norquist told me that this issue comes down to one thing: freedom. And that’s — I should make clear, that’s freedom for him, not freedom for everybody else to be able to live in a functioning society, freedom for people not to be suppressed by corporate interests, not for the freedom of people to be able to have access to healthcare. He wants no government. And for him, the tax issue is a means of controlling the Republican Party, whipping members in line and, ultimately, defunding the government.

The reason Grover is really important to this story is that Americans for Tax Reform has been the backbone of the modern anti-tax movement. And he created something called the anti-tax pledge, an actual pledge that elected officials can sign, where they say simply, “I will never raise taxes.” And using this pledge, Norquist has used it as a bludgeon to go after Republicans, most notably George Herbert Walker Bush, Bush senior, who committed the original sin of compromising and raising taxes, because he had no choice because he had a Democratic majority. Norquist found the compromise so unacceptable that he rallied people against Bush. And he’s turned this party into one where even if people want to raise taxes — President Trump is a good example — because they think that it’ll advance another part of their ideological agenda, Norquist’s group and his coalition has made it impossible for this party to raise taxes, which then makes it very difficult to actually govern when you’re the party in power, which Republicans have been.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, now, you expressed skepticism about their ability to pass this bill, but isn’t this bill so important in terms of Trump being able to declare a victory in his first year in office, that he will pull out all stops to whip the Republican — the slim majorities in both the House and Senate into line?

ARJUN SINGH: I wasn’t skeptical of this up until I started reporting on this series. For a long time that I’ve been covering politics in the era of Trump, I thought that Trump really had created a party where he was a kingmaker, and the party was a cult of personality around him. This anti-tax issue might actually be the breaking point for Trump himself.

Trump is trying to put himself against the anti-tax movement, that has held this entire party together, has actually dominated and controlled this party. And Trump has run as an anti-tax person. But Trump also wants to please different parts of his coalition. And so, I think, in this case, either he needs to make cuts to Medicaid to please those people, or he needs to figure out how people are going to raise the debt ceiling. But Trump is essentially trying to pass the logic that he is Trump, and people should listen to him. And that worked in his first term.

And we’ve seen a lot of rigmarole. They only have a handful of votes that they can lose on this. So, really, you only need one to three people who say, “I don’t want to cut Medicaid.” You have a lot of representatives in actually blue, liberal areas, who won Republican seats, and they’re afraid of their constituents. So, that’s why I have a little skepticism of if this bill is actually going to pass in the way that it is.

I think that the coalition Trump has created, he thought that it was a coalition created around himself, and we’re actually seeing that it’s a coalition that, in many ways, is self-interested. Working-class voters who switched to the Republican Party lean on these services. People who work in the government lean on these services. And you’re also seeing people becoming aware of connecting the dots between the Republican moves and things like not being able to access SNAP benefits, not being able to access your housing assistance. I think that’s another key thing here, is that people are recognizing the connection between federal Republican policy and what they see on the ground in their states.

AMY GOODMAN: Arjun Singh, we want to thank you so much for being with us, senior producer, co-host of the podcast Lever Time, which just released a series called “Tax Revolt.”

Coming up, America’s brain drain. Back in 30 seconds.

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AMY GOODMAN: “The Demagogue” by Lila Downs, performing in our Democracy Now! studio.