middle class? you know it is the argument of the republicans and the president that it is a middle class cut. it seems to be an argument that the american people aren t buying. 66% say this bill will benefit the wealthy. only 27% say it will help the middle class. we asked about the president s family. how will the trump family fare in it bill? 63% say better off. only 5% say worse off. 25% say the same. you mentioned the president s approval rating as well. you are right. we have a new approval rating number for him. 35% approval. that s a numerical low in all of cnn s polling throughout the year of donald trump s presidency. 59% disapprove and if you stack that up in history, chris, you know that donald trump is at the bottom, at this point in the presidency, compared to all of his modern era predecessors.
most of the media has been negative. i m not fussing about that. it s just a fact. number two, the bill has changed a lot. i think a lot of folks don t really understand yet what s in it. not because they re not smart but because it s just changed. i mean, i probably spent i don t know, 300 hours on this legislation, trying to keep up with the changes. i ll tell you this. the conference committee report made this bill better. senator rubio, senator lee, in my opinion, did the american people a great service by increasing the child tax credit. we cleaned up some of the problems. for example, we re not going to tax tuition labors for graduate students. we re not going to remove teachers deduction for out-of-pocket spending on classroom materials. we re not going to we re going to expand parents ability to use 529 program. a lot of the stuff that never
tell us about that. are your republican colleagues coming to you and asking for help? oh, yes. we ve had conversations on how we re going to deal with what s known as the technical corrections bill, bill that would correct mistakes made anyway bill that hasn t even been passed yet. there is an acknowledgement, as they dealt with things such as pass-through income, that there will be need for us to make adjustments going forward. how they ve dealt with some of the problems of middle income families. we have temporary tax provisions that will have to be modified. there are going to be issues with this bill. we ve heard from a lot of different groups as to whether this will have unintended consequences, state and local governments are concerned about it. we re going to hear from a lot of different groups once they figure out what s in this bill. fundamental flaw. hold on one second. in other words, privately, your republican colleagues are more worried about the lack of popularity and
bill than they re saying publicly? my colleagues, republican and democratic colleagues know we re going to have to pay attention to additional legislation after this bill is enacted into law. yes, that is true. one last question. there is this feeling amongst some of your colleagues in congress that al franken, your democratic colleague, offered to resign too quickly, prematurely. and, in fact, he should stay in the senate and that he should not resign. where are you on that? senator franken made a decision, what he thought was best. did he it for his constituents. he did not want to be distracted with an ethics investigation. he thought the people of minnesota deserve to have a senator devote full time to their issues. he made that decision based on what he thought was best for his own future. i respected the way he went about making that decision and i support his decision. okay. senator ben cardin, thank you so
are they expressing concern privately that this gambit, that they re hoping that when people live the tax plan they learn to love it, but there s no guarantee of that before the mid terms? republicans privately are most concerned about the president s poll numbers. republicans on capitol hill, rather than these particular numbers on the bill. as chris is saying, they do believe that americans will start to see some benefit and perceptions may change. more importantly, the numbers that have been concerning them for much of the year, in talking to republicans are, are the ones about how their own fellow republicans are judging them. and those numbers were going down. republicans across the country were so angry and disappointed with republican control of congress that they weren t following through on full repeal of obamacare, on the major promises that they had made that republicans were so fearful of that, that s the political imperative chris was just talking about that republicans