In the first year of Donald Trump’s first term, the Republican president signed a massive package of tax breaks approved by the Republican-led Congress. Party leaders expressed great confidence at the time that policy, which disproportionately benefited the wealthy, wouldn’t just boost the economy; it would also prove wildly popular ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.
Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the then-Senate majority leader, said in December 2017, “If we can’t sell this to the American people, we ought to go into another line of work.”
In the months that followed, GOP officials failed spectacularly to sell the package to the American people — because the tax breaks were so unpopular, they were excluded almost entirely from the party’s 2018 messaging — and Democrats ultimately took back the House majority in Trump’s first midterm cycle.
Eight years later, the circumstances are remarkably similar. In the first year of the president’s second term, a Republican-led Congress passed another massive package of tax breaks, which Trump signed into law. GOP officials again assumed that the policy would both strengthen the economy and pay electoral dividends.
And just like the events that unfolded in 2018, the party’s assumptions are running into a brutal reality. Politico reported:
Congressional Republicans have a political problem with their signature legislative achievement of the second Trump era: People don’t know about it.
A new POLITICO Poll finds that nearly half of Americans say they can’t explain the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — and those who can are much more likely to say it’s helped others, including the wealthy, but not them.
A plurality in the survey said the GOP’s megabill actually hurt their bottom line.
Complicating matters for the party, the same national survey found that only about a fourth of voters who supported Trump believe the working class got substantial breaks from the party’s signature domestic policy.
In other words, even the president’s base isn’t impressed.
In theory, if Republicans can’t run on their ineffective tax breaks, they could at least try to capitalize on the bipartisan housing bill that recently cleared Congress and became law, though Trump made sure his party didn’t get any political benefit from that, either.
With 98 days remaining before Election Day, there’s a reason GOP officials and candidates will try to convince voters that every Democrat is a transgender communist immigrant: It’s because Republicans, after nearly two years of control, have nothing to show for their work.
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