Former President Trump in a new interview sought to clarify comments from earlier in the week in which he said there are ways to go about “cutting” entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
“I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare,” Trump told Breitbart News on Wednesday. “We’ll have to do it elsewhere. But we’re not going to do anything to hurt them.”
“There’s so many things we can do,” Trump added. “There’s so much cutting and so much waste in so many other areas, but I’ll never do anything to hurt Social Security.”
Trump’s comments came after he took fire from President Biden over a Monday interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” during which he was asked how he would address long-term solvency issues with entitlement programs.
“So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting,” Trump said. “And in terms of, also, the theft and the bad management of entitlements — tremendous bad management of entitlements — there’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do.”
Biden quickly seized on those comments, vowing he would oppose any attempts to cut Social Security or Medicare. His campaign quickly cut Trump’s comments into an ad warning voters in battleground states that the former president and presumptive GOP nominee would threaten entitlement programs.
Trump has been adamant that Republicans should not touch Social Security or Medicare, a break from GOP orthodoxy and from some primary rivals who argued steps needed to be taken, such as raising the retirement age, to ensure the programs are solvent for years to come.
But as president, every one of Trump’s White House budget proposals included cuts to Social Security and Medicare programs.
The Republicans’ budget proposal for the upcoming fiscal year included measures aimed at beefing up work requirements for Medicaid, while reducing annual government spending and targeting economic policies passed when Democrats last led both chambers of Congress.