After Donald Trump boasted of a surprise middle-class tax cut, his allies in the White House and Congress scrambled to make the lie seem real.
The Washington Post reported that nobody in the White House nor on Capitol Hill was aware of a 10 percent middle-class tax cut when Trump bragged about creating one while speaking to reporters over the weekend.
"Yet Washington’s bureaucratic machinery whirred into action nonetheless," the report noted, "working to produce a policy that could be seen as supporting Trump’s whim."
One potential solution: "a symbolic nonbinding 'resolution' designed to signal to voters ahead of the elections that if Republicans hold their congressional majorities they might pass a future 10 percent tax cut for the middle class."
It's not the first time, the Post noted, that the GOP Congress and White House have had to "reverse-engineer" policy proposals based on Trump's "sudden public promises" — or to create evidence for his conspiracy theories.
The report listed a number of times the president's whims have come to fruition: the Pentagon whirring into action to create a "Space Force"; the Commerce Department's plan for automobile tariffs after Trump threatened the auto industry with them; and Vice President Mike Pence's defense of the president's claim that "unknown Middle Easterners" are among the caravan of migrant Central Americans making their way to the US border.
After Trump announced at a Monday rally for Ted Cruz that "we’re going to be putting in a 10 percent tax cut for middle-income families" by "next week," officials in his administration began rushing to figure out a way to get Congress to agree to a more "modest" version of the proposal, the report noted.
"But no decision has been made," the Post added, "and for the most part, lawmakers and senior administration officials are trying to temper expectations and deflect questions over a tax plan that, as of now, exists only in the president’s telling."
Read the entire report via the Post.