Despite his previous rhetoric to the contrary, it’s clear that Donald Trump is trying to finally be the one to successfully carry out the long-standing GOP goal: destroying Social Security.
By Branko Marcetic, Jacobin
Once upon a time, Donald Trump endeared himself to millions of working-class voters by telling them he, unlike the rest of the Republican Party, would do “everything within my power not to touch Social Security, to leave it the way it is.” While the GOP platform explicitly rejected the idea the program was untouchable and promised only to keep it unchanged for “current retirees and those close to retirement,” Trump told voters he “want[ed] to keep Social Security intact” while “they want to cut it very substantially, the Republicans.”
Fast-forward nine years, and Trump has become just another Republican president launching an assault on Social Security. Not even two months into his presidency, Trump is not only constantly verbally attacking the program in a way meant to justify debilitating cuts but is already actively making those cuts.
After weeks of charging that Social Security payments were going to tens of millions of dead people, Trump made the claim a major part of his address to Congress this past week, where he said there were “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program.” This was no offhand mention: the claim took up more than two-and-a-half minutes in the speech, or four full four paragraphs, with Trump listing in tedious detail the millions of Americans in various age groups over one-hundred years old still in the Social Security databases.
This claim is such nonsense that it’s been repeatedly and widely debunked, including by Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy. In reality, the program has not been paying benefits out to anyone over the age of 115 since 2015, and the incongruous age listings are likely a quirk of antiquated coding.
But Trump’s emphasis on the supposed rampant fraud in Social Security — as well as claims by people close to him, like billionaire Elon Musk, that the program is a “Ponzi scheme” — is part of a long tradition in US politics: of Republican and Democratic politicians hellbent on cutting Social Security using claims like these as a fig leaf to justify taking apart it and other entitlement programs.
Take former president Ronald Reagan, a lifelong foe of the program who for decades backed privatizing it. Upon winning the presidency, Reagan put together a task force that recommended raising the retirement age and other cuts to Social Security over the course of his presidency.
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