NY Times: Trump Finds GOP Plan to Campaign on Tax Reform ‘Boring,’ Will Focus on Immigration, Trade Agenda

Trump Speech Joe RaedleGetty Images
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President Trump finds the Republican establishment’s plan to run their 2018 midterm election campaigns on the recently passed tax cuts “boring,” according to the New York Times, and will instead focus his efforts on his wildly popular “America First” immigration and trade agenda.

The report by the New York Times reveals the GOP establishment’s efforts to restrain Trump from focusing on his populist immigration and trade agenda—where he advocates for less foreign competition against America’s workers.

The party’s leaders have pleaded with Trump to focus much of his campaign attention on pushing House Speaker Paul Ryan’s tax cuts, a plan backed by the pro-mass immigration billionaire Koch brothers and that they claim will keep them in the majority in the House and Senate.

The New York Times notes:

When House Speaker Paul D. Ryan hosted a meeting of major Republican donors in Austin, Tex., this month, the head of the Congressional Leadership Fund, the primary House G.O.P. super PAC, delivered a presentation with a plea that the party “must sell the benefits of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” to retain the House. [Emphasis added]

Defying the GOP’s efforts to run midterm campaigns on Ryan’s brand of republicanism, Trump reportedly finds the tax reform agenda “boring” and instead will continue to focus on his two most popular issues: Reducing immigration and ending unfair free trade.

The New York Times reports:

Eric Beach, a Republican strategist who leads a pro-Trump political committee, Great America PAC, said Mr. Trump was rightly suspicious of the political formula favored by conventional Republican leaders like Mr. Ryan and Mr. McConnell.

“He doesn’t think that’s how you win elections because that’s not how he won his election,” Mr. Beach said. “He knows and understands that the core issues of today are illegal immigration — including building the wall — and trade inequity.” [Emphasis added]

Month after month polling, as Breitbart News has chronicled, has shown that GOP voters and swing-voters do not find the tax reform agenda significant enough to get out and vote for Republicans in the midterm elections.

In a poll conducted last month, Harvard-Harris researchers found that reducing immigration was a bigger priority for GOP voters than tax cuts, repealing Obamacare, getting the U.S. out of the Iran Deal, destroying ISIS, and expanding family leave.

Immigration is so important to Republicans that it even surpassed the economy and jobs as being the biggest issue.

Supporters of Trump’s say reducing immigration should be the second biggest priority for the White House, just after stimulating American jobs.

Likewise, Trump’s efforts to roll back unfair multinational free trade deals and implement tariffs to protect American workers’ jobs is vastly popular with black Americans, where 60 percent recently said that free trade has resulted in U.S. job loss, as Breitbart News reported.

Trump’s plan to campaign for Republicans by promoting his popular immigration and trade agenda was evident in his most recent remarks at a rally in Michigan, where he blasted the Republican-controlled Congress and Democrats for not funding his border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border yet.

“We have to have borders and we have to have them fast and we need security, we need the wall,” Trump said.

“We come up again on September 28th and if we don’t get border security, we’ll have no choice. We’ll close down the country,” Trump said. “Because we need border security.”

On free trade, Trump continued to promote his negotiations on multinational, job-killing free trade deals like NAFTA.

“So, we’re doing trade deals. And a lot of these folks in Washington, ‘Please don’t do that.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute, we have a horrible deal on this one, on that one.'”

In Trump’s final remark at the Michigan rally, he touted the need for immigration control and protection of the country’s cities, leaving out the more uninfluential tax reform sell.

“We need to elect more Republicans so we can protect our cities, defend our borders, grow our economy, and continue to make America great again.”

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

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