Trump’s Corruption-Policy Nexus Comes Into Focus
Did the disgraced former one-term president sell Social Security and Medicare the same way he sold his position on TikTok and Bud Light?
It didn’t escape the Biden campaign’s notice that Donald Trump abruptly changed his tune on cutting Social Security and Medicare.
Trump appeared on CNBC Monday—his first mainstream or quasi-mainstream interview in many weeks—and, when prodded over whether he’d reconsidered his position on entitlements, said he will indeed consider cutting the country’s two big retirement programs for seniors. Just like a fusty old Republican.
“So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements,” Trump said. “There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do,” he added, before lapsing into blather.
If you’re deep in the weeds on this stuff or a certain kind of know-it-all you can argue there’s nothing new here. When Trump was president, his annual budgets all envisioned cutting these very programs, so if you ignore his once-studious campaign-trail insistence that he’d never touch them, or chalk it up to intentional deception, you can write it all off as old news.
But this kind of jaded thinking gives Trump a pass on the interesting question of why he let the mask slip. In greater context, he’s been reversing his rhetorical commitments a lot lately, and each time it’s been for one reason: An interested party has given him a lot of money.
CUTS BOTH WAYS
Trump’s comments Monday were particularly striking when held up against his routine, almost suspiciously defensive promise to leave Medicare and Social Security untouched. That, more than just about any other policy commitment, distinguished Trump from GOP leaders who preceded him. He spent the 2024 primary campaign attacking rivals like Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis for supporting steep retirement-program cuts.
It was easy to identify this as something he considered an important political commitment, because he honored it through his first term, even as he more clearly abandoned his simultaneous promise not to cut Medicaid—the standing federal health-insurance program for poor people.
Trump ultimately went after Medicaid quite aggressively, and will again if he returns to office. The fact that Social Security and Medicare cuts ended up in his presidential budgets, but not in his actual policy record, is a surface manifestation of how much of the job he outsourced to conservative-movement ideologues. They wrote the party platform, they didn’t write his scripts, or negotiating tactics, or ad hoc propaganda, and there he was consistent: No cuts.
Now, just as President Biden tries to divide congressional Republicans over their hide-the-ball plan to cut entitlements once they gain power, Trump has essentially revealed the ball. And in the face of rapid, sustained Biden campaign blowback—the kind Democrats reserve exclusively for kitchen-table issues—Trump’s campaign didn’t even bother to walk it back.
Though I can’t prove this, and feel a little bit conspiratorial positing it, I suspect Trump reversed his opposition to entitlement cuts for the same reason he reversed his support for the right-wing’s Bud Light boycott and his own, years long opposition to TikTok: