Trump Is Getting Dragged On Twitter For Talking About Tax Reform During Harvey
As Texas continues to deal with the overwhelming devastation and destruction of Hurricane Harvey, the president has pivoted his attention to pushing forward an unfulfilled political agenda. Donald Trump's tax speech during Hurricane Harvey has flared up a good deal of backlash on Twitter, with many users complaining that the timing is inappropriate and tone-deaf. Pile that onto a whole other slew of general criticisms about Trump's handling of the disaster – and the president isn't doing so well in the Twitterverse backlash department right now.
Trump pitched an overhaul of the tax code on Aug. 30, appearing in Springfield, Missouri to discuss a plan that he claimed would "bring back Main Street." He arrived in Missouri as flooding in Texas continues to devastate communities, with 32,000 people currently in shelters, 210,000 people asking for assistance from FEMA and a reported 38 deaths suspected to be related to the storm so far. The hurricane is now hitting the Beaumont-Port Arthur region of Texas, prompting the area's mayor, Derrick Freeman, to appeal to residents on Facebook,
Our whole city is underwater right now but we are coming! If you called, we are coming.
So, no, I think it's safe to say that the president's main duty right now is not to head to Springfield and push forward his tax reform agenda. I also think it's pretty safe to say that right now, taxes are not super high on anyone's priority list.
However, if he was so dead set on going to Missouri, at the very least he could have supplied more information about what his tax reform would actually do. Aside for the outline he released in April, Trump didn't really offer any new information.
Plus, while he claims that his new proposal will take the burden off the middle-class and small business owners, independent tax experts predict that the wealthiest Americans will actually receive the most generous cuts. Democrats in Senate are already girding themselves for this, with forty-five members banding together to sign a letter saying that Trump cannot enforce tax cuts on 1 percent-ers.
Trump took to Twitter to announce his arrival in Missouri – plus a reminder that he had "won [the state] by a lot in '16" – a statement which makes me happy to have such a killer gag reflex.
But Twitter quickly called him out for directing attention away from the tragedies unfolding in Texas.
Aside from some "MAGA" affirmations, it's clear from the majority of the responses that no one is thinking about tax reform right now.
There was, however, a smattering of people who would prefer that the president skip their home state of Missouri altogether.
Timing of his tax reform speech aside, Trump has also been hit with a lot of backlash for the speech he delivered during in Corpus Christi, Texas this week.
Namely, the fact that he seemed more interested in crowd size than the hurricane victims. In front of a group of cordoned-off supporters, he bragged about the crowd size. "What a crowd," he said. "What a turnout." The president also added that some vague statements, including the fact that the crowd was "special," and that he "loved" them, which is nice, I guess, but fairly useless.
He also didn't meet one-on-one with any hurricane victims during his trip to Texas, making him the first president in a long while not to fulfill the most human and empathetic of his duties. Just look at some other presidents doing their jobs:
My apologies for adding one more serving of maddening, infuriating items to your news plate today. I know the whole "Trump treating hurricane victims as his own personal MAGA rally" thing has already ruined pretty much everything already.
