Earlier this month, the Tax Policy Center released its analysis of Donald Trump’s proposed plan for tax reform. If you are rich, you were probably pretty thrilled with the findings. According to the T.P.C., based on the details revealed by National Economic Council director Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in April, the Trump plan would give those earning more than $3.4 million an average tax cut of $937,700, while the average family earning less than $25,000 would receive a cut of . . . $40. Put another way, the plan would be 23,500 times better for the ultra-rich than the poor. Which is why you could be forgiven if, upon reading Trump’s interview with Wall Street Journal yesterday, you found yourself surprised to learn that Trump actually cares more about the middle class than the wealthy and is prepared to raise taxes on the latter.

According to the president, whose preference for the wealthy is well known (you wouldn’t put a “poor person” in charge of the economy, after all), it’s actually the non-rich who he’s looking to help, all statements and actions to the contrary.

“The truth is,” he told reporters Gerard Baker, Peter Nicholas, and Michael C. Bender, “the people I care most about are the middle-income people in this country who have gotten screwed. And if there’s upward revision it’s going to be on high-income people.” Then he told a story about how he had dinner with his friend Bob Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, and Bob told him Donald, don’t worry about the rich people. Tax the rich people. You got to take care of the people in this country, and he thought that was “a very interesting statement” and feels the same way.

The only problem, of course, is that the tax plan Team Trump unveiled in April doesn’t do that at all. In fact, it does—what’s the word?—the opposite. In addition to bringing the top tax rate down to 35 percent, Trump’s most recent tax proposal would allow people like hedge-fund managers and owners of the Trump Organization to set up their businesses so that their income is taxed at the corporate rate, which Trump wants to slash to 15 percent (although “political and fiscal realities” may prevent it from falling below 25 percent). It would also eliminate the inheritance tax, which only applies to estates worth over $5.49 million for individuals and $10.98 million for married couples. Although Cohn and Mnuchin insisted, with straight faces, that getting rid of the inheritance tax was all about “American farmers” as opposed to people like the five children of a multi-billionaire who just turned 71 in June, it’s difficult to see how that’s the case. As the Tax Policy Center’s Mark Mazur told Bloomberg, “If you’re serious about not cutting taxes for higher-income people you probably wouldn’t repeal the estate tax. The benefits largely flow to the top.”

It wouldn’t be the first time that Trump has claimed he’s going to tax the rich, before releasing proposals that lower taxes on the rich, which in some cultures might be called lying. As Vox’s Jim Tankersley recalls, in August 2015, candidate Trump told Bloomberg “I do very well. I don't mind paying a little more in taxes. The middle class is getting clobbered in this country.” Then he unveiled a tax plan that called for bringing the top rate down to 25 percent and eliminating the death tax.