Trump Allies Launch Massive Campaign Lying About Tax Cuts for Rich

Donald Trump’s lobbyist friends are starting a nationwide campaign to convince the public that Republicans’ lopsided 2017 tax cuts—which benefited large corporations and the wealthy—should be renewed.

In a minute-long TV ad, the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, or AFP, described the Trump tax cuts as “a landmark law that gave hardworking Americans much-needed relief.” It then rattled off a list of statistics before blaming Bidenomics for inflation while scary music played.

AFP’s version of events goes against every piece of evidence that emerged after the tax cuts went into effect.

If the law is extended, households in the top 1 percent of income on average will receive tax cuts of more than $60,000, while households in the bottom 60 percent will get only $500, according to the Tax Policy Center.

“Wage growth is tepid … and gross domestic product growth is slowing and projected to revert to its long-term trend or below,” the Center for American Progress wrote in 2019. “Meanwhile, budget deficits are higher due to revenue losses—which have largely been triggered by the massive corporate tax cut at the heart of the TCJA [Trump’s tax cut bill].”

And yet AFP is committing to its own fictional story, even describing its Koch-funded initiative as “grassroots.” But not everyone is buying it.

“Americans for Prosperity is spending $20 million on a new ad campaign that champions the 2017 Trump tax law as a win for working families,” Patriotic Millionaires chair Morris Pearl told Common Dreams. “But don’t be fooled: What this Koch-backed group is really only after is protecting tax cuts for wealthy people like me.”

Some unexpected musicians are slated to perform at Donald Trump’s inauguration next week, including some with long histories of beefing with the president-elect.

So far, country singer-songwriter Carrie Underwood and disco group the Village People have agreed to perform at the forty-seventh president’s inaugural ceremony.

“We are announcing today that VILLAGE PEOPLE have accepted an invitation from President Elect Trump’s campaign to participate in inaugural activities, including at least one event with President Elect Trump,” Victor Willis, a founding member of the group, wrote on Facebook, arguing that the event would be an opportunity to bring the country together. “We know this wont make some of you happy to hear, however we believe that music is to be performed without regard to politics.”

That is in spite of the group’s legal history with the former president. Willis himself issued a cease and desist letter to Trump in 2020 after the Republican presidential candidate refused to stop playing “Macho Man” and the “Y.M.C.A.,” calling Trump’s repeated use of the song a “nuisance.” (Willis later defended Trump’s use of the song, claiming he didn’t “have the heart” to tell Trump to stop dancing to “Y.M.C.A.”)

The Village People were among dozens of artists who sued Trump for playing their music without permission (or compensation) at his campaign rallies. Other offended artists included Sinéad O’Connor, The Beatles, Adele, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Guns N’ Roses, Leonard Cohen, Queen, Prince, Pharrell, the Rolling Stones, The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, Rihanna, Neil Young, Linkin Park, the late Tom Petty, and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler.

Underwood, meanwhile, is expected to sing a rendition of “America the Beautiful” at Trump’s ceremony. The country music star has skirted political labels for years, but in 2017, she took an open jab at Trump during the Country Music Awards, parodying her song “Before He Cheats” to include a controversial line about Trump’s incendiary social media habits.

“And it’s fun to watch, yeah, that’s for sure/’til little Rocket Man starts a nuclear war … and then maybe next time, he’ll think before he tweets,” Underwood sang alongside Brad Paisley.

Still, in an interview with The Guardian in 2019, Underwood attempted to claim that her politics were undefined.

“I feel like more people try to pin me places politically,” she said at the time. “Everybody tries to sum everything up and put a bow on it, like it’s black and white. And it’s not like that.”

Trump struggled to find musicians to perform at his last inauguration, with reports circulating that some of his favorites—Céline Dion, Andrea Bocelli, Garth Brooks, and Sir Elton John—roundly rejected the invites.

Judge Aileen Cannon has slapped down an attempt to block special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on Donald Trump’s 2020 election subversion case.

That will effectively make Smith’s summation of the failed criminal investigation available to the public. The dissemination of Trump’s classified documents case will be set to a hearing, per Cannon’s Monday memo.

In a filing last week, Attorney General Merrick Garland outlined his intentions to publicize the memo, which constitutes “volume one” of Smith’s report. But Garland never intended to make the so-called second volume on Trump’s classified documents case public, instead planning to hand the report to the chair and ranking member of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.

Cannon had initially ordered on January 7 that the Justice Department would not be allowed to release Smith’s final report on his two federal criminal investigations into the president-elect.

Cannon’s ruling stated that Garland, the Department of Justice, Smith, and “all of their officers, agents, and employees, and all persons acting in active concert or participation with such individuals” could not publish any part of the report until three days after the Eleventh Circuit ruled on the case.

The decision was a score for two of Trump’s co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, who argued that the release of the reports would cause “irreparable prejudice to defendants’ criminal proceedings.”

But the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Cannon’s decision last week, leaving Cannon with little option but to rescind her order.

The first volume of Smith’s report will likely become public after Cannon’s initial temporary injunction expires at midnight—unless the Eleventh Circuit intervenes again.

Smith concluded his investigations shortly after Trump won the November election. He resigned from the Justice Department last week.

This story has been updated.

In the weeks leading up to Mark Zuckerberg’s sweeping changes to Meta’s content moderation policies, the billionaire technocrat had plenty of time to talk to Donald Trump, but apparently no chance to run the decision past his oversight board.

Michael McConnell, a Stanford law professor on Meta’s oversight board, told NPR’s All Things Considered Friday that his advisory group had not even been consulted on the decision to remove content filters for some bigoted and dangerous language targeting women, ethnic and religious minorities, and people who identify as LGBTQ+.

“This actually came as a surprise to us. We did not know that they were going to be revising that standard,” McConnell said.

This is particularly troubling, considering that the oversight board’s primary function is to review cases on appeal from Meta users to see whether the company’s decisions are in line with its values—something that seem to be rapidly changing.

While Zuckerberg may not have floated Meta’s rightward policy shift past those involved in adjudicating those actual policies, he did apparently have plenty of time to talk to Trump.

Senator Markwayne Mullin told right-wing commentator Benny Johnson on an episode of The Benny Show Thursday that Zuckerberg had begun speaking regularly with the president-elect.

“Mark met with President Trump the day before he announced that they were going to change the way they do censorship, essentially,” Mullin said.

“The big announcement that he made the other day, President Trump, and spoke about that, and Mark had been down to see the president several times already,” the Oklahoma Republican added.

Elon Musk was fact-checked on his own livestream after making false statements about the California wildfires, and Gavin Newsom was quick to call out the tech mogul on social media.

In a post on X Sunday night, the California governor posted an excerpt from the livestream, where Musk was receiving a briefing with the command team handling the Palisades fire in Los Angeles. Musk asked an emergency official twice about water to fight the fires being available in the Malibu area but not in the Palisades.

The official corrected Musk, pointing out there was not a water shortage but that the fire required much more water than could be pumped.

Right-wing pundits and commentators have come up with a number of different reasons at the root of the wildfires, from attacking California Democrats for their “far-left policies” to making the racist claim that “DEI” was a major cause. In reality, while better prevention measures could have been taken, Musk, Donald Trump, and other conservative personalities are using the disaster to score political points without offering much help.

Even the conservative claim that better water management could have mitigated the wildfires doesn’t hold up. Experts in the area told CNN last week that the magnitude of these fires, among the worst in U.S. history, makes it impossible for even the best preparation and equipment to put out the blazes.

“I don’t know a water system in the world that is that prepared for this type of event,” Greg Pierce, a water-resource expert at UCLA, said to the network.

Musk, Trump, and conservative actor James Woods, among others, have all made the false claim that water reservoirs in the affected areas are empty, even as the state of California said they were “brimming.” It’s no surprise that Newsom would seize upon Musk getting corrected to his face by an emergency management official, on his own livestream to boot. Perhaps the tech mogul and the rest of the opportunistic right should stop spreading misinformation and leave the firefighting to the experts.