Trump Floats Cuts to Social Security and Medicare

Nikki McCann Ramirez
·3 min read
41

Donald Trump kicked off Monday morning bright and early with a wide-ranging interview on CNBC, during which he reminded viewers that a second Trump term would bring massive cuts to the entitlements they’ve been paying into for decades.

“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,” the former president told CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” responding to a question about Social Security and Medicare.

“I know that they’re going to end up weakening Social Security because the country is weak,” he added, before launching into a characteristic rant about his views on the Biden administration’s economic policies.

But when asked about how stable the American economy and government would be under his presidency, Trump offered no actual policy substance, instead bragging that he had “100,000” attendees at a rally in Waco, Texas. “We had a tremendous rally this weekend, we’re having rallies in Michigan — the rallies are bigger than they’ve ever been.”

Host Becky Quick interjected as Trump rambled about how there was no arena big enough to hold his supporters to ask if he cared that the U.S. credit rating had been downgraded by a major rating agency last year over the political turmoil fomented by Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election. “Sure, but it’s not because of Jan. 6. We got downgraded because of incompetent people, very incompetent people doing incompetent things,” he replied.

The interview covered a wide berth of topics, including the former president’s view on a proposed bill that could ban the social media app TikTok nationwide. Trump, who in the past supported a ban on the app, said: “There’s a lot of good and a lot of bad with TikTok. But the thing I don’t like is, without TikTok you can make Facebook bigger — and I consider Facebook to be the enemy of the people along with a lot of the media.”

The former president went on to hint at conspiracy theories surrounding Facebook’s role in the 2020 election by providing precincts with grant money and ballot “lock boxes” that were used to rig the election against him.

“But do you believe that TikTok is a national security threat or not?” host Andrew Ross Sorkin interjected. “I do believe that,” Trump clarified. “But we also have to have a problem with [others]. You have to have a problem with Facebook and lots of other companies too […] If you look at some of our American companies — when you talk about highly sophisticated companies — that you think are American, they’re not so American. They deal in China and if China wants anything from them they will give it, so that’s a national security risk also.”


With Trump now the all-but-confirmed Republican nominee in November’s election, the former president is also touting how well-liked he is among influential — and seedy by any standard but his own — public figures. Trump bragged about having the endorsement of Hungary’s autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who visited the former president at his Mar-a-Lago estate last week.

On his opponent, Trump described Biden’s State of the Union as the ramblings of an “angry and confused man,” who delivered a speech full of “division and hate”  — not that he would know anything about that.

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