going to be over before the end of 2018, it s not looking that way at all. i think what trump s lawyers are trying to do is keep him calm, keep him not onlyfrom tweeting something that he ll regret later that could be used against him, but trying to prevent him from firing mueller. which would of course have really dramatic consequences. they ve pushed back the date repeatedly, ty cobb at first said it s going to be t thanksgiving, then christmas that s right, i remember thanksgiving. that hadn t happened. you really are left wondering what s going to happen next year when trump is not exonerated by the date he expects to be? to go back to something that you said, the people you re talking to, the reason they think it will be longer is based on the nature of the investigation, from what s publicly viewable? right. the trials for manafort and rick gates that are they haven t been set yet. michael flynn, who s cooperating in ongoing way with mueller. george papadopoulos, coop
for your social security and your medicare and other programs, they may well think, well, gee, you know, this is not so good, you know, donald trump got a whole cake and i only got crumbs but at least i got some crumbs. i think that s a good point about i think that s a good point about popularity because i do think there s been a lot of focus on 2027 when taxes go up. most people will see some kind of cut next year and the year after that. right, exactly. i also feel like the way that politics works now, what matters most is what the activist base feels about it. what do you think this does to that part of the equation? i think this energizes the activist base like crazy, add ady barkan just told you. i just off a conference call with virginia democrats. they got a recount today which means they took the house back from republicans. they won at least 16 seats. there s another recount to go. we know the activist base is already incredibly energized. this will even do more. i
tester suggested. i am a budget hawk. i hope i m a budget hawk not only when democrats are in the white house but when there s a republican president. and also there s the very important issue, chris, of salt, continued deductibility of state and local taxes. it has been in our tax code since 1913, it should have remained in the tax code. you represent a suburban district in new jersey. new jersey has a state income tax. it s a place with relatively high tax state like new york and california. those states are really going to get pounded, particularly relatively affluent folks like the people in your district. do you think you re going to see tax hikes for people in your district because of this? that may occur with some. doubling the standard deduction affects in a positive way all districts across america, but we in new jersey have the highest property taxes in the nation. our new governor is suggesting that the state income tax may increase on upper-income filers
i mean, is that possible? the only way that that is possible is if the president is a lot poorer than he has told us. but look, i think it is not possible. and you know, when sarah sanders says on the personal side, remember, those pass-through rates are on the personal side. so when you take the reduction in the top rate, the pass-through income, the changes to the estate tax exempting more income from tax, the breaks for real estate in this bill, there is no way if the president has any semblance of the wealth that he claims that he s not going to come out way ahead in this bill. the wouldn t here is that if you re sitting on a bunch of buildings that are throwing off passive income, like a real estate mogul, all of a sudden you just got an enormous once in a lifetime tax boon. that s what just happened today. no one is going to benefit more in some ways than a person who s situated in precisely that way. right.
there s this desire on the part of the president to get an exoneration. he s, according to some reporting, talking about how he s going to get a letter. but that seems unlikely to me. seems unlikely to most legal experts who have experience in this kind of thing. that s not how robert mueller is going to do things just because that would essentially diminish his leverage. if you were to exonerate the president now before hearing everything michael flynn has to say, before hearing everything that the transition team has to say. he got their e-mails. he s going to be interviewing them in conjunction with the written statements that they said last december. which they didn t realize that he actually had. so he still has to go through all of these things. for him to exonerate trump now before learning the half of it would be useless. the other thing is, prosecutors don t write exoneration letters. the way it works is you got chargeable crimes, you charge a person, or not, bring it to