Trump’s Impossible Task: Delivering for the Working Class and Billionaires

The big surprise on election night was that a presidential race billed for months as being neck and neck didn’t turn out to be very close at all. In the end, Donald Trump swept all seven swing states. He improved on his 2020 vote share nearly everywhere on the map. And he made significant gains with working-class Latino and Black voters, putting together the most diverse Republican coalition since the Civil Rights Movement, even as his campaign eagerly trotted out billionaire supporters such as Elon Musk and Howard Lutnick at rallies.

Now that he’s headed back to the White House, Trump has the tough task of keeping this sprawling coalition intact. As a candidate, he promised something for everyone. He’d extend his 2017 tax cuts, beloved by the wealthy and Wall Street (price tag: $4.6 trillion); remove taxes on tipped wages for service workers ($250 billion); increase the child tax credit from $2,000 to $5,000 to shore up family budgets ($3 trillion); and eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits to give seniors a boost ($1.8 trillion). But Republicans can’t possibly deliver all this, or even most of it, despite having full control of Washington.