In a new interview, former President Trump sought to explain comments he made earlier this week, in which he stated there are methods to “cut” entitlement systems like Social Security and Medicare.
“I will never do anything that threatens or harms Social Security or Medicare,” Trump told Breitbart News on Wednesday. “We will have to do it elsewhere. But we won’t do anything to harm them.”
“There’s so many things we can do,” Trump said. “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 come after he was chastised by President Biden for a Monday interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in which he was asked how he would resolve long-term solvency difficulties with entitlement programs.
“So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting,” he remarked. “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 instantly jumped on those remarks, vowing to reject any attempts to reduce Social Security or Medicare. His campaign promptly turned Trump’s remarks into an advertisement warning voters in battleground states that the former president and probable Republican nominee would jeopardize entitlement services.
Trump has been adamant that Republicans should not alter Social Security or Medicare, defying GOP orthodoxy and some primary rivals who believed that changes, such as raising the retirement age, were required to maintain the program’s long-term viability.
However, as president, each of Trump’s White House budget proposals contained cutbacks to Social Security and Medicare.
The Republican’s budget proposal for the upcoming fiscal year contained provisions aimed at increasing Medicaid work requirements, decreasing annual government spending, and targeting economic policies established when Democrats previously controlled both chambers of Congress.