In 1986, the Gipper worked with Democrats to succeed. In 2017, a Republican president who likes to compare himself to Reagan faces much tougher odds

Moments before he was due to go on live TV to respond to a Ronald Reagan speech about tax reform, the Democratic lawmaker Dan Rostenkowski jumped out of his chair and shouted: “I’m not going to do it!”



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He was just joking. Rostenkowski sat down and, according to the Washington Post, delivered the speech of his life. “Working families file their tax forms with the nagging feeling that they’re the biggest suckers and chumps in the world,” he said.

Rostenkowski endorsed the president’s plan – he asked the public to “Write Rosty” and lend support – and Democrats worked with Reagan to achieve a major tax overhaul in 1986.

A generation later, Donald Trump is hoping to pull off the same trick, with an announcement of his reform expected on Wednesday. If the self-declared master dealmaker – facing a changed economy and divided Congress – can pull it off, he will have at least made at start toward claiming Reagan’s mantle.

Finding Trump’s soulmate in presidential history has become something of a Washington parlour game. Some compare him to Andrew Jackson, a fiery populist; Trump flew to Nashville last month to mark Jackson’s 250th birthday. Critics are more likely to reach for Richard Nixon, synonymous with scandal and the kind of dark rhetoric heard in Trump’s inaugural address.

The 45th president himself has drawn parallels with Reagan, once saying the 41st president was “a fairly liberal Democrat, and he evolved over years and he became more and more conservative”. The vice-president, Mike Pence, told this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference: “I believe President Trump has given voice to aspirations and frustrations to Americans like no leader since Reagan.”

There are some striking parallels. Trump, 70, is the oldest person ever elected US president. Before him, Reagan, at 69, held the record. Trump is a businessman and reality TV star; Reagan was a B-movie actor and spokesman for General Electric. Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan was “Make America great again”; Reagan’s in 1980 was “Let’s make America great again”. Both were met with scepticism by establishment Republicans and both are better known for politics-as-performance than any grasp of policy detail.

Yet the tax issue may illustrate what divides them. Reagan, a former governor of California, did not provoke visceral dislike: he won 49 states out of 50 in 1984, a tally that seems unthinkable in today’s hyperpartisan politics. His upbeat inaugural address included a paean to Washington: “Standing here, one faces a magnificent vista, opening up on this city’s special beauty and history.” Trump spoke of “transferring power from Washington” and a grim vision of “American carnage”.

Deep fissures

After the debacle of failed healthcare reform, Trump has promised to turn to tax in the hope of quick win. In theory, it will easier to compartmentalise and less emotive at the grassroots. The president told the Fox Business Network recently: “Tax reform is going to be tough, but it won’t be as tough as healthcare.”

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, believes Republicans will be motivated by the 2018 elections and need to stimulate growth. “Unlike the 3D chess problem of what might a parliamentarian agree on healthcare, it’s all linear and moves right or left on tax reform,” he said.

House and Senate Republicans broadly agree on the outlines of reform: sweeping tax cuts for individuals and businesses while making up the lost revenue by scaling back tax breaks.

But just as with healthcare, there are deep fissures in Congress. Republicans are divided on the principle of a new “border adjustment tax”, which would impose levies on imports while charging exports nothing. The House speaker, Paul Ryan, argues that the tax is vital to lowering the top corporate income tax rate from 35% to 20%. But the Senate has little appetite for the measure and conservative organisations backed by the billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, are staunchly opposed.

Trump and Ryan could turn to the Democrats for support but the president is such a polarising figure that this seems a forlorn hope. Reagan, by contrast, frequently shared cocktails with the Democratic House speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill. In the Senate, a so-called “Gang of Seven” Republicans and Democrats steered the 1986 bill.

A further drag now is conflicting signals from the White House. At one point, Trump said the House border tax was too complex. Later he said it was under consideration. The treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, told a Senate panel “there would be no absolute tax cut for the upper class”. But the plan Trump pushed in his presidential campaign would provide big tax breaks to high-income households.

Whereas Reagan turned to a tax revamp in the sixth year of his presidency, with diversions out of the way, the Trump project is sticky because of many outstanding and interwoven proposals including the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare; a trillion-dollar infrastructure programme; and military expansion.

And whereas Reagan was adamant that the changes should be “revenue neutral”, cutting individual tax rates while increasing payments for corporations, the 45th president seems less worried about adding to the government deficit.

‘There was a lot of bipartisanship’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, here seen with the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, has said Trump should release his own tax returns. Photograph: J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Even Reagan’s reform was not plain sailing. Jeffery Birnbaum, author of Lawmakers, Lobbyists, and the Unlikely Triumph of Tax Reform, a study of the 1986 bill, said: “It was a huge and nearly constant fight for two years after a long period of debate.

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“On this issue, anyway, there was a lot of bipartisanship. I believe you need Republicans and Democrats to pass anything as complex and pervasive as an overhaul of the income tax system. Reagan had brilliant advisers who had a command of the issue and had a very good rapport with the key Democrats.”

The prospects for a repeat look slim. Democrats chose to filibuster Trump’s supreme court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, prompting Republicans to change Senate rules so he could be confirmed. They are unlikely to cooperate on tax reform unless the president agrees to release his own tax returns.

Chuck Schumer, the minority leader in the Senate, has said: “If President Trump is serious about passing real tax reform to help the middle class, he should start by releasing his own full tax returns to erase any doubt of where his priorities lie.

“Until President Trump releases his full tax returns, a cloud of suspicion will remain and make it much more difficult to get tax reform legislation through the Congress.”

Democrats are also under pressure from their liberal base to oppose tax cuts for the wealthy. Delvone Michael, a member of the Tax March executive committee that organised nationwide demonstrations last weekend, said: “I think it’s going to be more of the same. Republicans have demonstrated for the last 40 years that they think tax breaks for the rich and wealthy is the way to go.

“People forget that the Reagan tax cuts exploded the budget deficit. If you look at income, the top 1% have done better and better, and the middle class and working class have done worse and worse. The only comparison between Trump and Ronald Reagan is that they want to give tax cuts to the rich. Trump is trying to accomplish more for his rich friends and rich billionaires than he is for average, everyday working-class people.”

Trump’s cabinet of Wall Street insiders and multimillionaires is not helpful symbolically when it comes to seek a bipartisan compromise. Mnuchin, for example, is a former Goldman Sachs banker and hedge fund manager.

William Brock, who served in Reagan’s cabinet as US trade representative and labor secretary, said: “The advantage we had was the relationship the president had with the Democrats. It was a good time to work out compromises.

“This time it’s going to be very difficult. A lot of us who’ve watched over the years hate the fact it’s so partisan. Things don’t last if they’re passed on a partisan basis, Obamacare being an example. Even if Republicans wanted to sit at the table – and I haven’t seen much evidence they do – I don’t see any evidence of Democrats responding. It takes two.”

Should a bipartisan consensus somehow be achieved, there is no guarantee of success. For any government, tax is a Gordian knot. Since Reagan and Congress rewrote the code, the number of exemptions, deductions and credits has rocketed. Taxpayers were handed $1.6tn in tax breaks in 2016, which is more than the government collected in individual income taxes.

Congress could scale back some of these tax breaks, allowing it to lower tax rates significantly. But the largest breaks are popular and have powerful constituencies: almost 34m families claimed the mortgage interest deduction in 2016, while more than 43m families took advantage of a deduction of state and local taxes. The House Republicans’ plan would retain the former but eliminate the latter.

In a recent Washington Post article, Birnbaum added: “Partisanship is the least of tax reform’s worries. The biggest fights in 1986 were between interests, not political parties. Dust-ups developed between high- and low-tax states; between manufacturers and service providers; and between companies that paid large amounts in taxes and those that paid little.

“The bill was dubbed the ‘Lobbyists’ Relief Act of 1986’ because every organized group clamored for narrow relief.”

‘Trump is stormy. Reagan was sunny’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Donald Trump points his finger as he speaks at Trump Tower in January. Photograph: UPI / Barcroft Images

Trump could face a similar challenge from an army of lobbyists, making Reagan a tough act to follow in this or any other field. “The Gipper” is now a beloved figure among mainstream Republicans and even, at times, quoted approvingly by Democrats. He has an airport named after him in the US capital, Washington – an honour it is hard to imagine being bestowed on Trump.

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Michael Cornfield, associate professor of political management at George Washington University, said: “Like Reagan, Trump established his name among Americans through commercial television. But Trump is stormy where Reagan was sunny. He is a populist, an ideology that cross-cuts the liberal-conservative spectrum, making for confrontation and confusion.

“Reagan’s team laid down his stage markers and scripts – which Reagan approved in keeping with his political philosophy – and Reagan delivered his lines. Trump tweets seemingly by impulse, and has yet to settle on a staff.”

Each is a man of his time. Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “I don’t think there is a one-to-on comparison between the Reagan era and now. The priorities are very different. We’re a much more consumer, service-oriented economy. The tech boom hadn’t taken place in the Reagan era. We’re in a very different space right now.

“When he started, Reagan was not seen as the hero of establishment Republicans as he is today. He was the creation of the base to lay down conservative principles. Today the base wants Trump to be a disrupter. We will see in the next 12 or 18 months just what the Trump era means.

“In the Reagan era, we didn’t get a real sense of it until the second term.”