President Donald Trump on Wednesday told Missourians to vote Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) out of office if she refused to support slashing the corporate tax rate.
Trump made the pitch during a speech promoting his administration’s tax agenda, which is still lacking in any significant detail.
He spoke in broad strokes, saying that it was a “monumental thing that happened” when Ronald Reagan signed into law the Tax Reform Act of 1986, lowering the top corporate tax rate to 34 percent. Trump argued that the rest of the world subsequently lowering their tax rates demanded more corporate tax cuts in the United States.
“We must, we have no choice, we must lower our taxes. And your senator, Claire McCaskill, she must do this for you. And if she doesn’t do it for you, you have to vote her out of office,” Trump said to applause. “She’s got to make that commitment. If she doesn’t do it — we just can’t do this anymore with the obstruction and the obstructionists.”
For her part, McCaskill has offered some hope of finding common ground with Trump, including on corporate tax cuts. She is up for reelection in 2018.
“This is an area on which I’m optimistic President Trump and I will find common ground,” she said in a statement to the Washington Post over the weekend. “I’ve talked in a lot of my town halls about my support for simplifying the tax code by cleaning out loopholes and goodies for special interests, and lowering the corporate tax rate — as long as we’re doing it all through the lens of strengthening Missouri’s working families.”
Slashing corporate rates was one of four broad points Trump made during the address, though he didn’t provide detail for any of them. He also outlined simplifying the tax code by removing special interest deductions, making tax returns fit on a single page; providing “tax relief for middle class families”; and making it less “punitive” for corporations to repatriate “trillions of dollars in wealth that’s parked overseas.”
