President Donald Trump unveiled a tax cut plan Wednesday that would cut corporate and individual taxes, as well as completely eliminate the estate tax — a tax that falls only on the richest Americans (something like two out of every 1,000 estates are impacted).
At a rally in Indiana, Trump touted Kip Tom, a Leesburg resident, as a potential victim of this estate tax. “With us today is Kip Tom, a family farmer,” the president said. He explained that Tom’s family has been in farming for 187 years. “That could come to an end because of the death tax or the estate tax,” he warned.
But Tom isn’t just some small-time family farmer. He is a former congressional candidate who narrowly lost his primary in 2016; he was recruited as a “Young Gun” by the National Republican Congressional Committee.
The financial disclosure he filed in 2015 reveals that his income was well into the millions. In addition to owning Tom Farms, he is the president of grain storage and drying firm CereServ Inc., which he reports gave him over $5 million in income during the reporting period.
Chuck Collins of the Institute of Policy Studies, using a database of agribusiness farm subsidies, notes that Tom Farms, which claims to have 17,000 acres in production around the world, is Indiana’s ninth largest recipient of farm subsidies. Between 2004 and 2014, Tom and his various companies received around $3.3 million in farm subsidies.
Kip Tom’s family will probably be OK.
Top photo: Kip Tom, a past agriculture adviser to then-President-Elect Donald Trump, is seen upon his arrival in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York on Jan. 5, 2017.
IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT.
What we’re seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government.
This is not hyperbole.
Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation.
Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.”
The Intercept has long covered authoritarian governments, billionaire oligarchs, and backsliding democracies around the world. We understand the challenge we face in Trump and the vital importance of press freedom in defending democracy.
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IT’S BEEN A DEVASTATING year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.
We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.
In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.
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I’M BEN MUESSIG, The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. It’s been a devastating year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.
We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.
In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.
That’s where you come in. Will you help us expand our reporting capacity in time to hit the ground running in 2026?
We’re independent of corporate interests. Will you help us?
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