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Trump Is Right About Taxing the Rich
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Trump Is Right About Taxing the Rich
President Donald Trump reportedly asked House Speaker Mike Johnson to add a new, higher, top income tax rate on annual earnings above $2.5 million to a new budget bill. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Raising taxes on the wealthy shouldn’t be Republican heresy. Here’s how to do it.
By Charles Lane
05.12.25 — U.S. Politics
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Trump Is Right About Taxing the Rich
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Donald Trump has upended Republican orthodoxy on everything from free trade to foreign policy. Now he is being tempted with the ultimate GOP heresy: a proposal, bubbling up on the party’s populist wing, to raise taxes on the rich.

It has created tensions between advocates such as House Freedom Caucus chairman Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, on the one hand, and anti-tax traditionalists such as Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and Grover Norquist, the lobbyist who exacts no-tax-rise pledges from GOP House candidates, on the other.

For the moment, Trump seems uncharacteristically squishy on the issue, spooked by something that rarely frightens him otherwise: political blowback.

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Charles Lane

Charles Lane was previously an editor and columnist for The Washington Post, where he was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. The author of three books, he has also been a foreign correspondent and editor of the New Republic; his action against a notorious journalistic fraud at that magazine became the subject of the acclaimed 2003 film, Shattered Glass.

Tags:
Donald Trump
Politics
Republicans
Economics
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