Trump tries to woo billionaire CEOs with promise of another round of tax cuts: report

Former President Donald Trump is trying to push the billionaire businessman class back into his camp with a promise of another round of corporate tax cuts, this time reducing the rate from 21 percent to 20 percent.

According to The New York Times, "Mr. Trump made the remarks from a comfortable gray armchair during a conversation with his former economic adviser Larry Kudlow in front of the audience of dozens of leading chief executives, including Tim Cook of Apple, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, Doug McMillon of Walmart and Charles W. Scharf of Wells Fargo. They had gathered on Thursday morning in Washington for a meeting of the Business Roundtable, an influential corporate group, and there was said to be palpable relief in the room when Mr. Trump, who has been trying to woo business leaders as potential donors, told the executives much of what they had hoped to hear."

This came on the same day that Trump delivered a speech on his second term priorities to Republicans on Capitol Hill, where he caused a stir by referring to the swing-state population center and GOP convention location of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as a "horrible city."

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"Many leaders in corporate America have been nervous that in a second term, Mr. Trump might not be as friendly toward them as he was in his first. Many ended up abandoning him and publicly criticizing him, especially after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021," said the report. "Mr. Trump, whose public speeches are often characterized by conspiratorial promises to root 'Communists' out of government and hard-line policies such as overseeing the largest deportation operation in American history, was described by one of the people who attended the meeting to have sounded relatively more measured than usual, modulating his messages for the elite audience. He most strikingly softened his language about immigration. But it was his spiel about taxes that seemed most visibly pleasing to the executives in the room, according to people who attended the meeting."

In Trump's previous term, one of his most significant and controversial legislative accomplishments was a sweeping tax cut bill on both individual and corporate rates, the latter from 35 percent to 21 percent — although in practice, most corporations, and especially large multinational corporations, had various loopholes and exemptions that brought down their rate from 35 percent even before that. The vast majority of benefits of that bill are expected to accrue to the top 1 percent of earners by 2027.

Since taking office, President Joe Biden has made some reforms of his own to balance the tax code, including a provision of the Inflation Reduction Act that creates a minimum tax rate for large corporations.