The Media Will Never Stop Falling For It

Over the last week, amidst ongoing budget negotiations, the Trump administration laced the media with suggestions that he is thinking about raising taxes on the rich. 

The idea has been drifting around GOP circles for a few weeks. It started to get more attention last Wednesday, when Trump had a call with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson where he reportedly floated the idea of a 2.6% tax increase on income over $2.5M ($5M for married couples).  

The proposal itself is just a tiny, partial rollback of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. It would create a 39.6% tax bracket for income over $2.5M. But before the 2017 cuts, that bracket already existed, and it applied to income over $418,400. The proposal would raise $300B over a decade, but the cuts Republicans are trying to pass alongside it would cost $5 trillion over the same period. It’s also not exactly a tax hike: the 2017 cuts are set to expire next year, so the top rate would be going up for those high earners regardless. Trump’s proposal would actually be a tax increase on fewer high earners than we’d see if the cuts are just left to expire.

In other words, this is a fairly minor policy item, and framing it as a “tax increase on the rich” is a bit misleading. And yet, here are some of the headlines it generated:

• The New York Times: Trump Revives Push for Higher Taxes on the Rich

• CNN: Trump floats raising taxes on the rich to pay for his sweeping tax and spending cuts package

• NBC News: Trump's float of a tax hike for the wealthy quickly runs into GOP resistance

Semafor’s Ben Smith took to social media to say that this reflected “a remarkable shift in the Republican Party.” Trump passes a massive tax cut for the wealthy, then makes a phone call where he floats peeling back a small fraction of those cuts, and he gets credit for a “remarkable shift” in the direction of the party. He can place the thinnest veneer over his bullshit and have these media folks clapping like seals.

If you ever find yourself thinking “why am I hearing about this minor policy item?” the answer is almost always “because someone wants you to.” In this case that someone is Donald Trump. Not only did Republican officials leak his call with Mike Johnson to the press, but Trump posted on Truth Social saying that he would be ok with a “tiny” tax increase on the rich despite the political risks.

The reason a relatively small budget matter is making splashy headlines is that it’s not really a budget matter, it’s a PR matter. Trump wants people to believe that he is a political maverick who fights for regular people. The point of the tax proposal isn’t to “help protect Medicaid” (as The New York Times reported) but to generate favorable headlines for Donald Trump. I know this because the proposal does one of those things really well, and the other not at all. 

Headline generation is Trump’s most pronounced talent. He knows that the media will feel obligated to report what he says while hesitating to characterize his statements as dishonest. After all, the former is factual reporting, and the latter is editorializing. 

We’ve seen this play out many times before. Last year on the campaign trail, Trump claimed that he would, if elected, help make IVF free to consumers. This was obvious bullshit (something I touched on a bit here). The President alone doesn’t have the power, nor does the Republican Party have the political will. Nonetheless, the New York Times published a story headlined “Trump Called for I.V.F. to Be Free. How Would That Work?” CNN wrote one titled “Trump proposes making government or insurance companies pay for IVF treatments.” Does anyone believe that those stories did their readers a service?

Trump’s 2024 win is no longer much of a mystery. He won by mobilizing low-information, low-propensity voters – people who rarely, if ever, consume the news. In fact, polling shows that Trump won people who don’t consume political news at all by 19 points. He did this in part by sprinkling these sorts of hyper-digestible lies throughout the discourse. Low-information voters would encounter them through friends or on social media; glancing bits of headlines designed to rattle around in their brains. “Trump’s raising taxes on the rich!” “Trump’s giving you free IVF!” They’re sound bites that would fall apart with more context, but that doesn’t matter, because they’re designed for people who don’t consume context.

One thing traditional media has never quite accepted is that they’re in the propaganda business whether they like it or not. They may not originate it, but they disseminate it. That should, you would think, foist some burden on them not to regurgitate in print every claim made by a serial bullshitter. But if the media was particularly good at this sort of thing we’d live in a different world, and you might not be reduced to reading a podcaster’s newsletter. For which I give my apologies and my thanks.