For decades, in Republican circles, it was known simply as The Pledge.
It made and broke candidacies. It was signed and cited and used as a cudgel. It shaped conservative policy for a generation.
It was also just a single (run-on) sentence:
That oath — known formally as the Taxpayer Protection Pledge — is circulated annually by the conservative group Americans for Tax Reform. Each year, hundreds of Republican lawmakers sign on; so have GOP presidential nominees like Bob Dole, Mitt Romney, and both Bushes.
But not Donald Trump. The president declined to sign the pledge during his 2016 campaign, although he didn’t raise taxes in his first term. Now, Trump is giving some conservatives heartburn, as he considers becoming the first Republican president in decades to endorse higher taxes on the wealthy. Will he actually pull the trigger? And how did an aversion to tax increases harden into Republican orthodoxy?
The story starts in the 1980s, when a pair of bills signed by Ronald Reagan slashed the income tax rate for the highest bracket from 70% to 28%, a historic decrease over less than a decade. Reagan wanted to keep his tax legacy secure, so he tasked Grover Norquist, then a 29-year-old speechwriter at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with launching the nonprofit advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform.
During the 1986 midterms, as Reagan prepared to approve his final tax cut package, Norquist’s group began asking Republicans in Congress to sign commitments affirming that they wouldn’t double back on Reagan’s work and raise taxes in the future. Norquist’s pressure — and the fundraising dollars that went along with it — proved successful. In 2011, 60 Minutes said that Norquist “has been responsible more than anyone else for rewriting the dogma of the Republican Party.”
In his decades of advocacy, Norquist counts a single loss: in 1990, George H. W. Bush signed a bipartisan deal to bring the top tax rate up to 31%. Norquist often says that the measure — which violated Bush’s promise, “Read my lips: no new taxes” — is what cost Bush his reelection two years later.
No Republican member of Congress has voted for a tax rate increase since.
But the Republican Party is changing. In Reagan’s day, the GOP was propped up by a coalition he liked to call the “three-legged stool”: social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and foreign interventionists.
Norquist has claimed that Trump is a fundamentally “Reaganite” figure, but Trump, at times, has spurned all three of those once-critical factions: pushing the GOP to moderate on abortion, accept ballooning deficits, and adopt a more isolationist posture.
The party’s voters are changing, too. Consider this chart by Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, showing that the two party coalitions have essentially swapped places since the 1990s.
You can watch as the share of the Republican coalition made up of highly educated, high income voters steadily falls, while the opposite transformation takes hold among the Democrats.
With that realignment in mind, some Republicans are asking whether it still makes political sense to avoid raising any taxes — even on the wealthy — as Norquist’s pledge demands.
The perfect opportunity for these Republicans is about to present itself: the tax cuts that Trump signed into law in 2017 are poised to expire at the end of this year, including a change that brought the top tax rate down from 39.6% to 37%.
According to the Washington Post, Vice President JD Vance is among those open to letting that tax cut for the country’s highest earners (the 0.5% who make more than $642,000 a year) lapse. From the outside, Republican strategist Steve Bannon — who fashions himself the keeper of Trump’s populist flame — has been pushing the GOP to take this option, or go further by creating an even higher tax bracket for those earning $1 million or more.
Trump himself — who said in 2015 that his tax policies would cost billionaires like him “a fortune” — has wavered on the question. He has reportedly expressed openness to raising taxes on the wealthy when talking to Republican senators, but in a recent interview with Time magazine, Trump seemed more hesitant.
“I actually love the concept, but I don’t want it to be used against me politically,” he said, citing the Bush example. “I would be honored to pay more,” Trump added, “but I don’t want to be in a position where we lose an election because I was generous.” (According to Pew, 58% of Americans, including 43% of Republicans, support raising taxes on Americans who make at least $400,000 a year.)
In a message to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Trump concluded: “If you can do without it, you’re probably better off trying to do so” — hardly a firm rejection of the proposal. A White House official told Semafor after the Time interview that Trump is still “weighing” the idea.
Most Republican leaders (true to the pledge they took to Norquist) remain opposed to the proposal, which makes it somewhat unlikely Trump would push it, and guarantees an uphill battle if he does (though GOP lawmakers have generally fallen in line when Trump has asked them to so far in his second term).
If Republicans don’t raise any taxes, though, a new math problem emerges: how to pay for extending the 2017 tax cuts? According to the Tax Foundation, the extension would cost $4.5 trillion over the next decade, and that figure doesn’t take into account other cuts Trump wants to add, including cutting taxes on tips and Social Security benefits, which would further reduce federal revenue.
Letting the top tax rate return to 39.6% would raise about $400 billion over 10 years, which would help the GOP offset the costs of extending the other tax cuts.
Otherwise, the Republicans will either have to massively expand the deficit or pay for the loss in government revenue by cutting spending for government programs like Medicaid, which provides health insurance for poor and disabled Americans. This would spark a competing set of political problems for a party still growing accustomed to its increasing reliance on low-income voters.
Bannon has publicly warned Republicans against cutting Medicaid spending (“A lot of MAGA’s on Medicaid,” he’s said), as have GOP lawmakers like Missouri senator Josh Hawley, who has expressed openness to raising taxes on the wealthy as well.
These fights are worth watching, not necessarily because 2025 is likely to be the year a Republican president signs a tax increase. What’s more interesting is what they tell us about the future of the GOP.
Ruffini, the pollster, has written about the split inside the GOP between “Vibes Populism” (offering populist messaging) and “Programmatic Populism” (pursuing populist policies).
Trump and many of his voters, Ruffini says, are more “Vibes Populists.” Back in November, he told me most Trump voters wouldn’t be fazed by tax cuts for the wealthy: “They just care about their own [taxes] being cut,” Ruffini said.
But another segment, the programmatic populists, disagree with that analysis, arguing that Republicans will maintain working-class support only if they write policy with working-class voters in mind.
(In addition to Medicaid, Republicans are also considering changes to the food stamps program, although Politico has reported that the White House is hesitant about those cuts as well, “with concerns mounting about benefit cuts hitting President Donald Trump’s own voters.”)
It’s notable that some of the GOP’s young firebrands, like Vance and Hawley, are on the populist end of these disputes, battling with graybeards like Norquist for supremacy over the next chapter of the party. Tariffs are yet another battle line; Vance and Hawley are supportive, while Norquist has long been opposed. (They are a form of taxation, after all.) With Vance poised to be the likely frontrunner for the party’s 2028 presidential nod, his stances — no matter what the GOP decides on taxes this year — offer a signal of where the party may be headed next.
Conversely, now that its coalition is growing significantly richer, it will be worth watching whether the Democratic Party makes the opposite move, adopting policies that are more friendly to high earners. This swap in demographics threatens to dismantle the status quo Norquist has spent decades building. “The idiot staffers at the White House don’t know any economics,” he recently fumed to the Atlantic, referring to advisers urging Trump to push for higher taxes.
Bannon, meanwhile, couldn’t be happier. “Politically, it’s game, set, match,” he told the Washington Post about a potential GOP-backed tax on millionaires. It’s a no-brainer. This would destroy the Democrats.”