U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in an interview published Wednesday that the Republican tax plan will include breaks for the wealthy, a rhetorical change that contradicts President Donald Trump’s promises that the wealthy won’t like a net tax cut.

“The top 20 percent of those people today pay 95 percent of the taxes. The top 10 percent of those people today pay 81 percent of the taxes,” Mnuchin told Politico. “So when you’re cutting taxess hard not to give tax cuts to the wealthy with tax cuts to the middle class. The math, given you’re currently collecting, is just tough to do. ”

The Treasury secretary’s perspectives on how wealthy Americans would fare under taxation laws have evolved over the past year. Last November, he told CNBC that Trump wanted “no complete tax cut for the upper class,” which prompted Democrats to label which guarantee the “Mnuchin Rule. ” In the ensuing months, Mnuchin softened that promise in public remarks — in June, he said he had “walked it back. ” Trump, however, said as recently as Sept. 14 that his tax plan is “not to benefit the wealthy. This is to benefit the middle class. ”

Mnuchin’s acknowledgement that the wealthy would benefit from the tax plan is a gift to Democrats, who have blasted the proposal a message which Trump and Republicans have struggled to counter. The GOP framework requires trillions of dollars in tax cuts, 80 percent of which would flow to the top 1 percent, according to a preliminary analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Republican leaders have dismissed that study by noting that it relied on details from an earlier GOP plan. They say their framework is incomplete and that they have to fill in details that would benefit the class, such as to raise the child tax credit.

In his interview, Mnuchin also defended the framework’s call for repeal of the estate tax, which applies to estates worth at least $5.49 million per person. “Why should people have to pay taxes when they die? &#x201D. The Treasury chief gave an “#x 201D & complete guarantee; that Trump would sign a tax bill.

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