(Bloomberg View) -- Oh boy. There he goes again.
Listening to President Donald Trump unveil his tax reform "plan" -- a term I'm using loosely -- on Thursday afternoon in Springfield, Missouri, it was hard not to be reminded of the first big legislative push of his administration, the one that fell miserably short of repealing and replacing Obamacare.
Then, as now, Trump's idea of what the legislation should accomplish was pretty much in direct conflict with what the Republicans in Congress wanted to pass. Then, as now, Trump showed zero interest in actually crafting a bill, preferring instead to let Congress take care of the gritty details. Then, as now, his idea of lobbying Congress was bullying individual legislators, this time Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill. Then, as now, he made extravagant promises about the great good his plan would do the country, very little of which was, you know, plausible.
Two things are different this time, though. First, unlike with health care, congressional Republicans are largely united in what they hope to accomplish with a tax bill: lower corporate taxes, repatriation of American profits that are sitting overseas to avoid taxation, and most importantly, big tax cuts for the rich. Secondly, having been through the health care fiasco -- and understanding now that Trump is incapable of learning from his mistakes -- they know they'll have to get it done without his help, and possibly while he takes potshots at them on Twitter.
Still, I'm ready to go on record and predict that there will be no tax reform law, just as there was no new health care law. Trump will make the same mistakes he made last time -- and so will the Republican majority in the Senate.
The first mistake will be the misalignment of goals. With health care, Trump continually said that it was going to provide "insurance for everybody," even though the bill that emerged from the Senate would have done the opposite, depriving some 16 million of Obamacare insurance. That bait-and-switch was at the heart of those angry town hall meetings, which, in turn, sank in the Senate.
The same is likely to happen with tax reform. Trump says that one of his top priorities is delivering tax relief to the middle class "so they can do more with their paychecks,” he said in Thursday's speech. “They will go out and spend their money and it will be a beautiful thing to watch."
But as the Republicans in Congress well understand, there is simply no way to significantly lower taxes on the middle class without drastically increasing the federal deficit -- and that is something (as Republicans also know) that they can't do under the current rules of the game. Besides, Republicans don't much care about middle class taxes. It's the rich they're looking out for. And again, that disconnect, once it becomes clear to voters, has the potential to create the same sense of anger as the Republican health care effort.
The next mistake is trying to pass a bill without the Democrats. Of course, if they did include the Democrats, they would have agree to compromises they wouldn't like -- such as keeping the estate tax or cutting certain corporate loopholes -- at a time when compromise has become a dirty word.
That forces Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell back to the uncomfortable spot he occupied during the health care fight: needing 50 votes when there are only 52 Republican senators. If he loses three of them, as he did the last time, tax reform is dead. As Jonathan Chait pointed out recently in New York magazine:
Almost every Republican senator is going to have at least one current preference in the tax code they want to keep. Since McConnell needs the votes of almost all of them, he won't be able to ignore any of their requests. Eliminating deductions with that political strategy is going to be virtually impossible.
Yet if Congress can't offset cuts with large numbers of deductions, the numbers simply don't work.
The third mistake -- or, more likely, series of mistakes -- will be the way Trump behaves as the legislation works its way through Congress. As committees painstakingly write the bill and push the process forward, Trump will take credit for it. He probably won't know what's in the bill, so when he inevitably calls meetings to twist arms, he will do more harm than good. He'll send out tweets that will alienate potential allies and energize opponents on the Hill and in town halls.
He'll call on Congress to do the impossible, like drop the corporate tax rate to 15 percent. Republicans have trillions of reasons why it can't go much lower than 25 percent, but Trump won't acknowledge them until its too late. And there's always the possibility -- indeed, the likelihood -- that he will do something that causes Washington, and the country, to recoil in horror, as with his reaction to the Charlottesville protests.
There is one aspect of tax reform that both Republicans and Democrats agree on: the need to repatriate the trillions of dollars in corporate profits that reside abroad. Getting that money back to the U.S. where it can be -- one hopes -- reinvested will require some form of temporary tax relief for corporations. Democrats seem inclined to go along.
This one small piece of tax reform ought to be a slam dunk. And it is the one reform I think has a chance to pass. But it's unlikely to be easy. In the age of Trump, nothing is.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Joe Nocera is a Bloomberg View columnist. He has written business columns for Esquire, GQ and the New York Times, and is the former editorial director of Fortune. He is the co-author of "Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA."
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mike Nizza at mnizza3@bloomberg.net.
For more columns from Bloomberg View, visit http://www.bloomberg.com/view.
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