The paradox of high rates and low yields is explained by the rational lobbying strategy of corporate firms. Business in general would benefit from lower rates. But from the perspective of any individual firm, the highest return on lobbying investment is earned by seeking special favors of value to that particular company or industry. A decade-long effort to reform corporate taxation might reduce the nominal rate to 25 percent. A shrewdly negotiated special favor can cut a company’s tax obligation to zero overnight.

From the point of view of future U.S. growth and prosperity, the broad outline of tax reform seems obvious. Lower corporate rates to somewhere between 25 and 30 percent, the developed-world norm. Tighten collection so that the rate is actually paid. This is one reform that should come near to paying for itself, since collections from the present loopholed system have shrunk to such relatively low levels. Make up any difference by raising other, underperforming taxes, especially excise taxes; while collections from the individual income tax have doubled since 1997, receipts from the federal excise tax on alcohol have risen only by one-third over the same period.

Those are changes that could command broad assent. The present Republican plan to use the manifest need for corporate tax reform to shift the burden of the individual income tax from the wealthiest to middle-income families in blue states will not.

Congressional Republicans well appreciate the unpopularity of what they are doing. That’s why they are short-circuiting the traditional legislative process, bypassing hearings and other opportunities for public comment. The more the public knows, the more jeopardized their plan becomes. Since the Great Recession, the GOP has grown both more extreme in its goals and more radical in its methods. Apocalyptically pessimistic in its view of America’s future, it seems determined to seize for its donors and core constituencies as much as it can, as fast as it can, as ruthlessly as it can. It will then take advantage of the U.S. political system’s notorious antimajoritarian bias in favor of the status quo to defend the grab over the coming years and decades. Repeal and replace failed. The new slogan is: Rush, grab, entrench, and defend.

Despair is always a bad counselor. This hubris and haste will not deliver the results that U.S. businesses want and that the American public should expect. A normal Republican president would say so. A normal Republican president would enlarge the narrow views of his congressional party—if only to win a second term for himself, but ideally because presidents by their job definition are compelled to think of the wider interests of the nation. But President Trump, elevated by the Electoral College on the basis of a Michael Dukakis–size share of the popular vote, is not only the least public-spirited president in U.S. history, but also the most ignorant and shortsighted. He struck an implicit deal with the congressional Republicans during the campaign of 2016: If they would shield his wrongdoing, he would sign their bills. It’s the one of the rare commitments in his lifetime on which he has not (yet) reneged.