Jeffries bashes Trump, GOP on SALT

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday went after former President Trump for reversing course on a popular tax break, noting that Republicans had imposed the same cap on state and local tax deductions that Trump now says he wants to abolish.

“It’s interesting to me that Donald Trump and extreme MAGA Republicans in the House and the Senate imposed a draconian cap on the state and local tax deduction that has cost middle class Americans thousands of dollars in increased taxes, and then want to turn around and want to pretend that – after being the arsonists who burned down the state and local tax deduction –  they’re the firefighters to rescue it,” Jeffries said during a press briefing in the Capitol. 

“No one is buying it.”

Prior to 2017, taxpayers could deduct the entirety of their state and local tax bill as a way to reduce their federal tax liability. Behind Trump, Republicans had installed a new $10,000 cap on that federal deduction, known as SALT, as part of their 2017 tax reform law, arguing it would hit only wealthy taxpayers to the benefit of lower-income Americans. 

Democrats accused Republicans of targeting residents of high-tax states like New York, New Jersey, California and Illinois – all of which happen to lean blue. They say the cap has hit middle-class workers in those wealthier states, and they’ve been fighting to raise the cap – or eliminate it altogether – ever since.  In that effort, they’ve been joined by GOP lawmakers in those regions, who have sought to distance themselves from their party’s tax overhaul. 

Democrats themselves have been somewhat divided on SALT. Some Democrats have called for eliminating the cap, while others have suggested imposing a new cap. The debate came up when the House, then under Democratic control, considered President Biden’s infrastructure bill in 2021.

In a turnaround, Trump, who signed the 2017 bill into law, is now voicing second thoughts about the SALT cap.

In a social media post last week, he suggested he would use a second term in the White House to remove the ceiling he had installed. 

“I will turn it around, get SALT back, lower your Taxes, and so much more,” he wrote on his Truth Social account the day before he staged a rally on Long Island. 

That rally, at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y., is part of Trump’s broader strategy to energize conservative voters to help vulnerable House Republicans in New York battleground districts keep their seats next year. 

Democrats are hoping to flip those seats, and Jeffries on Wednesday singled out New York and California – two states where the SALT cap is a resonate issue – as central to the Democrats’ strategy for retaking control of the lower chamber. 

“Certainly it’s a heavy concentration of competitive contests in New York and California. But it’s an expansive map, and House Democrats are increasingly on offense,” he said. 

Jeffries also bashed Trump for his plan to impose stiff tariffs on imports as a way to boost domestic manufacturing. 

“The Trump tariff plan is an aggressive tax on working families and working class Americans that will increase their costs by thousands of dollars per year,” he said. 

Jeffries said Democrats, with control of the House and Kamala Harris in the White House, would push a different tax strategy, prioritizing working-class benefits like the child tax credit, the  low-income housing tax credit and the earned-income tax credit. 

“We also are going to need to evaluate several of the provisions within the GOP tax scam, where 83 percent of the benefits went to the wealthiest 1 percent and saddled our children and grandchildren with $2 trillion worth of unnecessary debt in order to subsidize the lifestyles of the rich and shameless,” Jeffries said. 

The battle over the country’s tax policy will be front-and-center next year on Capitol Hill, because many of the provisions of the Republicans’ 2017 law – including the SALT cap – are set to expire at the end of 2025.