The Trumponomics book co-written by Donald Trump's economic adviser intended to portray him in a positive light -- and instead showed the ways the president used tax breaks to enrich his businesses.
New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait wrote that the book provided a "damning exposé of the corrupt bargain between Donald Trump and the party’s wealthy insiders." He noted that it was written in part by former CNBC host Larry Kudlow, who left the team that was writing the book halfway through to take over as director of the White House's National Economic Council.
Along with Kudlow, Trump supporters Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer "fervently propound supply-side economics, a doctrine that holds that economic performance hinges largely on maintaining low tax rates on the rich," Chait wrote.
In a roundabout way, Trumponomics "inadvertently clarifies how an economist who was declaring the U.S. housing market to be perfectly sound and on its way up in July 2008 secured a job" as the nation's top economic counselor, the review noted.
Chait added that the book is a "damning exposé of the corrupt bargain between Donald Trump and the party’s wealthy insiders."
The book depicted Kudlow assuring Trump that his much-touted tax cut wouldn't result in deficits because "the phony numbers of Washington’s bean counters” are “always wrong." As Chait noted, however, those "bean counters" were wrong only because they underestimated how large the deficit would grow following the tax cut.
"I want to make sure that this isn’t a tax cut for rich people like me," Trump, according to the book's authors, said -- in spite of numbers showing that it did primarily benefit the uber-wealthy.
The president "didn’t want the Trump middle-class voters to think that this plan was self-serving," Trumponomics detailed. Nevertheless, Chait wrote, those voters did view it that way.
Trump also, the book's authors wrote, opposed an end to policies allowing interest payments to be tax-deductible due to his own history using such deductions.
"Look, I’ve spent my whole life doing real estate deals,” he reportedly told the book's authors. “Every one of them was financed by debt. I hate this idea."
This scene, Chait noted, revealed "Trump killing a reform solely because it would negatively impact his own business" and came "just five pages after they credulously cite Trump promising that the tax cut won’t benefit him personally."
Read the entire review of Trumponomics via New York Magazine.
