As both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris seek to shore up support from voters with less than a month to go in a razor-thin presidential race, the former president is now reaching out to a sometimes forgotten demographic: U.S. citizens living abroad.
In a new effort to court voters, Trump said Wednesday he supports a plan to lower the tax burden on U.S. citizens living abroad. The U.S. is the sole major country that has an unusual rule of taxing its citizens on their total income regardless of where they earned it and where they live, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“I support ending the double taxation of overseas Americans,” according to a statement Trump provided to the Journal. The publication noted however that it remains uncertain what Trump means by double taxation and added that campaign officials have so far offered no further details about any policy change he would try to advance through Congress.
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Solomon Yue, chief executive of the advocacy group Republicans Overseas, told the Journal that he realized he might have a chance to get his issue added to the list of Trump’s earlier tax proposals, which he said inspired him. Trump has previously pushed on the campaign trail the elimination of taxes on tips, Social Security benefits and overtime pay, the Journal reported.
“It’s a giant first step,” Yue, a longtime RNC official told the Journal. He said the issue eventually got the attention of the former president after he urged campaign aides “to keep any position simple rather than get into a detailed explanation of citizenship-based taxation vs. residence-based taxation,” according to the Journal.
That plan worked, Yue told the Journal, adding that it helped push Trump’s new support for the issue.
