'Game, set and match': Steve Bannon despairs that GOP just lost a major battle

President Donald Trump vowed not to raise taxes on the rich to pay for his agenda — and handed a major win to the Democrats' left, a key player in the MAGA movement said Friday.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon said if the GOP had hiked taxes, it would have gutted “the AOC-Bernie ‘oligarchy tour.’”

MSNBC Opinion Editor James Downie also believes this "is a gift" to Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). “This GOP remains in the grips of the donors and the oligarchs, even as Americans are as furious as ever about our unequal society,” Downie said.

This week Trump announced that raising taxes on the rich would be “very disruptive.” It echoed a similar sentiment from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) who said, "I’m not in favor of raising the tax rates because our party is the group that stands against that traditionally," the speaker said.

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Taxing the rich is a policy typically associated with Democrats. However, GOP lawmakers had considered letting the 2017 rate (of 37% for the top tax bracket) increase at the end of this year.

The tax hike would have returned the tax bracket for the rich to 39.6%.

“Politically, it’s game, set, match,” Bannon told MSNBC.

“The 2017 tax cuts were unpopular from the moment they were passed, so much so that Republicans largely stopped touting them ahead of their 2018 midterm shellacking,” Downie recalled.

Without the tax hike, the Republican-controlled House now must contemplate cutting funding for programs like Medicaid and SNAP.

Last week, a dozen moderate Republicans warned Johnson against cutting Medicaid too deeply.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that this policy will reduce the poorest Americans’ incomes by 10%. The top 1% of Americans get an additional $25,500 in income.

“Bannon is right that making the wealthy pay more in taxes ‘is a no-brainer,’" opined Downie. “But if hiking taxes on the rich is a no-brainer, cutting taxes for the rich is the GOP’s primary reflex. No other policy so closely binds the party; no other goal leads billionaire donors to open their checkbooks again and again.”