Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said the quiet part out loud on Wednesday night.
Mulvaney reportedly admitted during a speech at an Oxford Union event in Britain that today’s Republican Party doesn’t honestly care about curtailing the now-staggering deficit when it comes to their preferred policies, according to an audio tape obtained by the Washington Post.
“My party is very interested in deficits when there is a Democrat in the White House,” the acting chief of staff said. “The worst thing in the whole world is deficits when Barack Obama was the President.”
“Then Donald Trump became president, and we’re a lot less interested as a party,” he continued.
President Donald Trump’s GOP-approved tax cuts in 2017, which primarily benefited the wealthy, caused the deficit to skyrocket to over 1 trillion dollars by 2020. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and other administration officials insisted back then (and still insist now) that the cuts will “pay for themselves,” but even one of the GOP congresspeople who crafted the tax bill, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX), admitted in July last year that they might not.
Mulvaney said on Wednesday night that while the deficit is “extraordinarily disturbing,” the GOP is “evolving” on the issue thanks to Trump.
Even still, Republicans have stridently attacked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) Green New Deal, universal health care, and other progressive legislation, claiming that such proposals will “bankrupt” the country.
And if Republicans want to tackle the deficit they inflated, they won’t do it with a pollution tax that would help combat climate change, according to Mulvaney.
“We take the position in my party that asking people to change their lifestyle dramatically, including by paying more taxes, is simply not something we are interested in doing,” he said.
