Hill.TV host Saagar Enjeti warned that President Trump could lose his 2020 bid to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) should the Vermont progressive become the Democratic nominee.
Enjeti on Friday pointed to a recent Pew Research Center survey showing that nearly half — 47 percent — of lower-income Republicans believe that the country’s current economic conditions are hurting them and their families.
“That is a huge warning sign for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the elites within the Republican Party who have made it clear that they’re going to run the 2020 presidential campaign on the strength of the economy,” Enjeti said, referring to the Pew survey.
“Trump and the Republicans would do very well to … quickly shift tactics or face the very real possibility of losing the 2020 presidential election, especially against a populist candidate like Bernie Sanders,” he later added.
Sanders, a self-described Democratic socialist, has made taking on the ultra wealthy a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. In September, the Vermont senator released a wealth tax that includes eight tax brackets, with the highest being the 8-percent bracket. Each bracket would be halved for those filing individually.
Trump, meanwhile, passed his own signature tax plan in 2017.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was hailed as Trump’s first major legislative victory and marked as the largest of the U.S. federal tax code in nearly three decades.
Even though Trump and his allies said the bill would not help the rich, the overhaul’s impact has come under renewed scrutiny following a new report that found that some of the most profitable companies in the U.S. didn’t pay any taxes last year as a result of the legislation.
According to a report released in December by the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, 91 companies on the Fortune 500 list didn’t pay any federal taxes in 2018.
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