If the G.O.P. tax plan fails—at least six senators have reportedly voiced concerns about the current bill—Republicans on Capitol Hill will have ready scapegoats in Steve Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, the two Goldman Sachs alums tasked with selling a multi-trillion-dollar tax cut for corporations as a benediction upon the middle class. Shilling for Donald Trump’s enormous giveaway to corporate America would be no easy task for even the most seasoned political operative: according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s official (nonpartisan) scorekeeper, families earning between $10,000 and $30,000 a year would get a tax increase starting in 2021; by 2027, most Americans earning up to $75,000 a year would be paying more in taxes.

But Mnuchin and Cohn, rather than disguise the gross inequities at the heart of the Republican plan, keep accidentally highlighting them. Cohn, who left his job as president of Goldman Sachs with an estimated $250 million to $600 million in assets, has described the tax bill as a gift to the rich that will “trickle down” to the less fortunate. (“The most excited group out there are big C.E.O.s, about our tax plan,” he added.) But he has struggled to communicate what that will mean without sounding hopelessly out of touch. In September, he excitedly told reporters that an extra $1,000 or so—the amount he estimated the average family would save—would allow Americans to “renovate their kitchen, they can buy a new car.” This month, he told CNBC that giving the majority of benefits to the wealthy was inevitable since the middle class is already paying so little. Mnuchin, who made much of his $300 million fortune by capitalizing on the subprime housing crisis, has said much the same thing. “When you’re cutting taxes across the board, it’s very hard not to give tax cuts to the wealthy with tax cuts to the middle class,” he told Politico’s Ben White in October. (“Obviously, the estate tax, I will concede, disproportionately helps rich people,” he acknowledged in a separate interview.) Earlier this month, he and his new wife, Louise Linton,—a living, breathing argument for raising taxes on the rich—were photographed at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington posing with freshly printed sheafs of dollar bills. (“I guess I should take that as a compliment, that I look like a villain in a great, successful James Bond movie,” Mnuchin told Fox News, when asked about the backlash.)

None of this has sat well with House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has waited his entire life to pass a tax bill of this magnitude and isn’t going to let it fail because two multi-millionaire Trump appointees can’t manage to stay on message. Per Politico: