Yes, he said he would protect Social Security and Medicare at the State of the Union and he’s been tweeting drivel like this ever since:
There’s a reason nobody believes him (aside from the fact that he just lies about everything.) Remember just a month ago he said this:
During an appearance on CNBC, Trump was asked if restructuring entitlement programs would ever be on his plate. “At some point, they will be,” Trump said from Davos, Switzerland, where he attended the World Economic Forum.
Trump cited the “tremendous growth” in the economy and suggested that would make it easier to change entitlement programs. “At the right time, we will take a look at that,” he said. “You know, that’s actually the easiest of all things.”
He even implied that he was talking about some privatization scheme he’d obviously been getting an earful about from the real billionaires at Davos who were buttering him up to his face and laughing about him behind his back.
Still, he walked it back shortly afterward:
He’s all over the place on this mostly because he just says he won’t cut social security and medicare in order to get elected. He could not care less about it one way or the other.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that the White House is expected to propose a $4.8 trillion budget that aims to slash these popular programs while increasing spending on NASA, defense, and veterans:
The White House proposes to cut spending by $4.4 trillion over a decade. Of that, it targets $2 trillion in savings from mandatory spending programs, including $130 billion from changes to Medicare prescription-drug pricing, $292 billion from safety-net cuts—such as work requirements for Medicaid and food stamps—and $70 billion from tightening eligibility access to federal disability benefits.
While this reported budget is sure to fail—Democrats control the House, after all—it’s still striking to witness the vast gulf between Trump’s stated pledges and his actual priorities. If Trump does unveil his budget tomorrow as expected, it will have been less than a week since his State of the Union address where he vowed to protect Medicare and Social Security. That itself was a galling shift from what he had said just two weeks before, when he publicly threatened to go after those very programs.
He can say anything. The thing to keep in mind is that his henchmen have a real agenda and when he is no longer seeking re-election there is every reason to believe they will get it done.