Oops, President Donald Trump did it again.

His casual mention of a 22 percent corporate rate on his way to New York last Saturday kicked off a week of unexpected haggling on a topline tax issue many considered already settled, just as congressional negotiators are rushing to get a final bill to the president in time for Christmas — a date he himself has insisted on.


It’s the latest example of the president getting in the way of his party’s major legislative goal, even if unintentionally, and once again shows the perils for policymakers and legislators in the Trump era, when an unexpected, off-the-cuff comment or tweet can undo weeks of work.

On Friday, more than 20 conservative groups — including Americans for Tax Reform, Club for Growth, FreedomWorks and the National Taxpayers Union — sent a letter to congressional conferees reminding them that the groups’ original support for any tax overhaul was tied to that magic 20 percent figure.

“We’re not into this screwing around about the corporate rate,” said Adam Brandon, president of FreedomWorks. “The 20 percent rate is incredibly important to us because we need the rates as low as possible to make sure we get 3 percent economic growth heading into the election.”

Trump’s 22 percent comment reminded some of the moment, following the House’s tough passage of its health care bill, in which Trump undercut lawmakers by calling the bill “mean.”

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This 22-percent instance was not as politically lethal, said former congressional aides — especially since the tax legislation seems on track to ultimately pass and that matters the most. But it showed that, once again, “Trump is not engaged with the specifics at all on the debate,” added a former Senate leadership aide.

Trump’s 22 percent comments came less than 24 hours after the Senate took an incredibly tough, ultimately successful vote on its tax bill. But that victory required Senate leadership to twist arms and cut deals with lawmakers worried about the deficit, small businesses, and the fates of DACA and Obamacare — a coalition that felt fragile even as the “yea” votes rolled in during the middle of the night.

Only Tennessee Republican Sen. Bob Corker, who recently announced his retirement, voted against the bill.

In a boastful moment the next day, Trump outlined what would come next. “Now we go onto conference and something beautiful is going to come out of that mixer,” he said.

“Business tax all the way down from 35 to 20. It could be 22 when it comes out, but it could also be 20. We’ll see what ultimately comes out,” he later added.

The brief aside set off a week of jockeying around Washington among CEOs, business groups, lobbyists and conservative activists — all of whom have long wanted the 20 percent corporate rate and believed it was locked in following the Senate bill’s passage.

“I don’t know what would have motivated the president the next day to suggest it was OK, from a negotiation standpoint,” said the former Senate leadership aide, who did not want to speak on the record given the sensitivities around the rate discussion. “It puts the Senate Republicans in a tough position of guarding the 20 percent figure at all costs.”

The 22 percent comments also set off a rush on the Hill this week, as various factions and lawmakers tried to allocate any extra money from a higher corporate rate to their pet causes — whether an expanded child tax credit or additional money for small businesses.

A senior White House official said the president threw out the 22 percent figure as a reflection of the conversations he was having and hearing about from lawmakers on Capitol Hill — not as a negotiating tactic.

It also did not signal any change from the White House’s long-held position of the corporate rate standing at 20 percent, the aide said. Before the White House and congressional leaders’ tax framework came out, the president had been adamant about dropping the corporate rate to 15 percent.

Conservative activists, business groups, and CEOs were a bit less cheery about any potential increase in the corporate rate, even by just percentage points, and they were confused about the messages emerging from the administration and the Hill.

After the president’s comments, Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey and White House economic adviser Gary Cohn on Wednesday spoke in separate sessions to a closed-door group of CEOs. They left the executives with the impressions that the corporate rate might rise.

Then, on Thursday, White House top economist Kevin Hassett echoed those sentiments by saying a higher rate would not threaten Republicans’ desired economic growth.

“They have overpromised what they can deliver with this bill,” said Mark Mazur, director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center and former assistant secretary for tax policy at the Treasury Department under President Barack Obama. “They will need to find the revenue from somewhere to finish up the bill.”

The easiest way to make adjustments at the end of any tax negotiation is to tweak the tax rates rather than diving into messier items like messing with deductions — hence the talk about increasing the corporate rate as lawmakers wrestle with wonkier questions like the fate of the corporate alternative minimum tax.

Conservatives and outside groups conceded that even a higher corporate rate would not kill off the momentum surrounding this bill.

“We can’t go crazy over 22 percent,” said one Republican lobbyist. “We’re not going to walk away over 2 percentage points, which just tells you how much we want this deal.”