When the president says he wants to cut taxes, he is referring to a provision in the Republican tax bill that cuts corporate taxes.
And that is exactly what he said.
But a new study finds that when the president is referring directly to the bill’s tax cuts for the wealthy, he gets more attention than when he talks about the overall package.
In fact, in the Fox News poll, Trump’s favorability rating among Republicans has actually gone down by 8 points since the first debate, when he said “we’re going to have a very, very big tax cut for the rich,” even though he was saying that the bill was for the middle class.
“If the president really wants to get tax cuts, he should just say, ‘Oh, you know, I’m for the billionaires,'” said Robert Blendon, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, who conducted the Fox poll.
The survey was conducted in early February, just days after the House voted to pass the bill.
It’s not clear why the tax bill’s popularity fell so much after the debate, but it may be that Republicans who supported the bill at the first debates were able to see how the president was responding to their criticism of the bill, Blendon said.
That could be a result of the debate and the fact that many of the tax cuts in the bill are being phased out over the next few years.
“You’re not really seeing Trump as an outlier,” Blendon told Fox News.
“This is just a symptom of the underlying issues.”
The Fox News survey, conducted online and over the phone, included 2,848 registered voters.
Fox News also surveyed 8,964 likely voters who said they had voted in the past.
The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
