Addressing supporters at an Elko, Nevada rally over the weekend, President Donald Trump announced that Republicans were poised to pass a new round of tax cuts, targeted at “middle income people,” with a plan to get them done by “sometime just prior, I would say, to November.”
Trump’s statement, originally reported by the Washington Post, caused confusion, as Congress is currently out of session until the midterm elections and November was less than two weeks away. The Post reported that a spokesperson for the House Ways and Means Committee “deferred to the White House on specifics on a new tax proposal.” The White House, in turn, did not respond to requests for clarification. However, prior to departing for Houston, Texas, to attend a rally for incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), the president spoke to reporters, restating his plan to pass new tax cuts by the midterms, and offering more details as to how he’d get them done.
The Toronto Star’s Washington correspondent Daniel Dale provided a transcript of the interaction on Twitter.
REPORTER: You said “lower tax cuts.” You said that you wanted tax cuts by November 1st. Congress isn’t even in session. How is that possible?
TRUMP: No, we’re going to be passing — no, no. We’re putting in a resolution sometime in the next week, or week and a half, two weeks.
REPORTER: A resolution where?
TRUMP: We’re going to put in — we’re giving a middle-income tax reduction of about 10 percent. We’re doing it now for middle-income people. This is not for business; this is for middle. That’s on top of the tax decrease that we’ve already given them.
REPORTER: Are you signing an executive order for that?
TRUMP: No. No. No. I’m going through Congress.
REPORTER: But Congress isn’t in session though.
TRUMP: We won’t have time to do the vote. We’ll do the vote later.
REPORTER: Congress is out.
TRUMP: We’ll do the vote after the election.
None of that makes sense.