He'll cut Medicare. Of course he will.
by digby
Democrats should run with this. Trump will lie and say he doesn't have any such plans but deep down all those senior Trump voters know that he's a lying sack of garbage. They just think he's been lying for them. This will nag them just a little bit:
While Republicans do not expect Trump to push for cuts while campaigning for reelection, they’ve apparently encouraged him to do so should he win a second term—a proposition to which President “I’m not going to cut Social Security, I’m not going to cut Medicare” has reportedly been receptive. “We’ve got to fix that,” Senator John Thune, the number two Republican in the Senate, told the Times. “It’s going to take presidential leadership to do that, and it’s going to take courage by the Congress to make some hard votes. We can’t keep kicking the can down the road. I hope in a second term, he is interested,” Thune said of Trump.
“With his leadership, I think we could start dealing with that crisis. And it is a crisis.” Republicans, said Senator John Barrasso, who seems to regularly chat with the president, have “brought it up with President Trump, who has talked about it being a second-term project.”
His promises are worthless. He lies more than any human on the planet. And lots of people think that's ok because they think he's just making a larger point about something with which they agree.
But if Trump gets a second term he has no incentive to keep the base happy no matter what. He will be listening to the financial people who will tell him that his fortune is in danger from humungous deficits. He would be very likely to go into slash and burn cutting mode. And I think we know that if he can't get it done legislatively he'll find ways to do it through executive power.
Elders are terrible suckers for snake oil salesmen but they have always had a pretty good bullshit detector when it comes to Medicare and Social Security. If Trump wins he's going to say he's "reforming" Medicare by cutting it. It remains to be seen if senior Republicans are so loyal that they'll believe that.
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