President Trump, in a bid to win over consumers suffering from high interest rates and auto manufacturers suffering from lower sales, is promising to make interest payments on car loans tax-deductible. Tax policy has become a major issue of the campaign as the 2017 tax cuts, which Trump himself signed, are due to expire next year. 

During an appearance at America’s auto capital — Detroit, Michigan — on Thursday, the former president announced his new agenda items. 

“I am announcing that as part of our tax cuts, we will make interest on car loans fully deductible,” Trump said, eliciting cheers from the audience. “When we do all of this, you will witness nothing less than the launch of a new American industrial revolution.”

With interest rates reaching the highest levels in decades under the Biden administration, Trump is hoping to put affordability at the heart of his campaign with a coterie of tax breaks for voters in critical swing states. In a bid for Nevada’s service employees, he has promised an elimination of taxes on tips. For seniors — a group where he lost votes between the 2016 and 2020 elections — he says he will eliminate taxes on Social Security. 

Now, he believes cutting consumer costs by making interest payments tax-deductible and subsidizing their debt, he can make a play for the auto industry employees, their families, and they ownership. 

Thousands of factories will open up all across our land. Great-paying blue-collar jobs will lift up those who have suffered so terribly over the past four years,” he claimed. “Inflation will come down fast. American cars and products will be exported and admired throughout the world again. Young people will move from the coasts and big cities into the heartland to build their fortunes on the new frontier of the American Midwest.”

Giving tax breaks for interest payments or for other personal debts has not been a part of the conservative agenda in the past, but then again, much of Trump’s populist policy prescriptions have broken that orthodoxy. In fact, it was President Reagan who signed a tax hike into law that ended the tax deductibility of credit card debt in 1986. 

Car manufacturers have seen a slight decrease in sales in recent years amid historic inflation rates and subsequent rate increases by the Federal Reserve. In 2023, American manufacturers sold about 15.5 million light vehicles, compared to about 17 million in 2019, before the pandemic that kept most Americans in their homes. 

The tax deductibility of car interest loan payments would be a major relief for middle class Americans that Trump needs to turn out in November. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Americans owe about $1.6 trillion in auto loans, which is the second-highest category of consumer debt. Just a decade ago, total auto loan debt across America totaled at around $950 billion.