Trump signals backing for cuts to Social Security, Medicare

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]illionaire Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, shifted his position on cuts in Social Security and Medicare on the eve of his visit to Capitol Hill for meetings with Republican congressional leaders. 

After claiming to reject such cuts throughout the Republican primary campaign—distancing himself from rivals who all backed one or another version of “entitlement reform”—Trump signaled Wednesday that he was reversing his position.

His top policy adviser Sam Clovis addressed a Washington DC conference hosted by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a group established by the billionaire former Nixon cabinet member to push for the dismantling of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in the name of cutting the federal budget deficit.

Even attending the conference was something of a signal, given the Peterson group’s identification with entitlement spending cuts. Clovis underscored the message, telling the conference, “I think after the administration’s been in place, then we will start to take a look at all of the programs, including entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.”

He added that Trump would not propose any changes in these programs during the election campaign, but wait until a new administration and Congress were elected. At that point, he said, “We’ll take a hard look at those to start seeing what we can do in a bipartisan way.”

As late as a Republican debate in March, Trump claimed that his economic policies, based on protectionism and trade warfare, would make the United States so rich that no changes would be needed in Social Security or Medicare. He also claimed, in keeping with the nostrums of supply-side economics, that his proposed trillions in tax cuts for the wealthy would cause economic growth to skyrocket, leading to a huge increase in federal tax revenue that would eliminate the federal budget deficit.

Clovis gave a more cautious undertaking to the Peterson group, which has forecast that Trump-sized tax cuts for the wealthy would produce $10 trillion in deficits, not a surplus. The Trump promise not to cut entitlements was conditional on tax cuts producing record economic growth, he said.

“Right now, we’re not going to touch anything because we can’t predict the growth,” Clovis said. “We have to start taking a look not just at Medicare and Social Security but every program we have out there, because the budgetary discipline that we’ve shown over the last 84 years has been horrible.”

Clovis also told the Wall Street Journal in an interview that Trump would support privatization of the Veterans Administration or its transformation into an insurance plan rather than a direct provider of health care services to veterans. “The VA’s a broken system now,” he said. “We can’t continue down that road.”

Trump’s well-publicized opposition to entitlement cuts, not his racist attacks on Muslims and other immigrants, were a major reason for the coolness towards his candidacy among congressional Republicans. House Speaker Paul Ryan, in particular, has long been identified with sweeping cuts in Medicare which he first proposed in 2011, after the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives installed him as chairman of the House Budget Committee.

Ryan has repeatedly pushed through budget resolutions in which privatization of Medicare, through converting it into a voucher program, was the centerpiece of massive cuts in federal spending on the entitlement program.

Trump not only criticized the Ryan budgets, he blamed them for the defeat of the Republican presidential campaign in 2012, when Ryan was on the ticket as Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential running mate.

Ryan’s declaration last week that he was “not there yet” in terms of an endorsement of Trump as the presumptive Republican nominee was aimed at securing assurances from Trump that his opposition to entitlement cuts was purely an electoral ploy, to be scrapped as soon as the votes are counted. Clovis’s appearance at the Peterson conference constituted such an assurance.

These maneuvers ensured that Thursday’s round of meetings on Capitol Hill between Trump and Republican congressional leaders would go smoothly. Trump and Ryan issued a joint statement that is remarkable for its cynical and reactionary character.

“While we were honest about our few differences, we recognize that there are also many important areas of common ground,” Trump and Ryan said. “We will be having additional discussions, but remain confident there’s a great opportunity to unify our party and win this fall, and we are totally committed to working together to achieve that goal.”

Ryan’s remarks to reporters after the meeting were just as effusive as the joint statement. “He’s a very warm and genuine person,” he said. “We really don’t know each other and we started to get to know each other.”

Trump responded in kind, indicating that he was satisfied with Ryan as the chairman of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland where he will be nominated. “I am happy to serve in this capacity at the Republican convention,” Ryan told reporters. “I would honor the decision of our presumptive nominee and he did express that preference.”

Every other top Republican congressional leader, in both the House and Senate, had already officially endorsed Trump before the Ryan-Trump meeting.

Trump and Ryan: Who is más repulsivo? The only choices this system produces are outright sociopaths, crooks, or hypocrites. The ignorance and induced stupidity of the American people is the huge burden that the world must bear.

Whatever concerns there may be over the impact of Trump’s candidacy on the Republican Party’s electoral fortunes, there are no principled objections to his blatant anti-immigrant racism, encouragement of violence against protesters, or embrace of authoritarian methods of rule.

There remain significant differences between Trump and the congressional Republicans over foreign policy, where Trump has claimed opposition to the 2003 war in Iraq and to the current US saber-rattling against Russia. This is combined with advocacy of a huge increase in US military spending and escalation of the current war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Nearly all the opposition to Trump within the Republican Party has been from the right—motivated by his supposed “isolationism” in foreign policy and his now-dropped opposition to entitlement cuts. Sections of the Republican Party have moved to explicitly or implicitly support Clinton, seeing her as a more reliable defender of American imperialism.

The Clinton campaign continues to send out regular updates on each Republican declaration of non-support for Trump, including an email Thursday portraying the Trump-Ryan meeting as a debacle for the Republican candidate, under the headline, “Ryan Again Refuses To Endorse Trump as Conservative Opposition To The GOP Nominee Grows.”

• ORIGINAL SELECT COMMENTSHolly Anderson • a day ago
  Donald Trump’s entire business career–his “art of the deal”–derives from highly questionable dealings with a pantheon of organized crime figures, corrupt financiers and intelligence-connected operatives. From his early entrepreneurial career in Atlantic City to his undertakings in Florida to his operations in Western cities like Las Vegas, one finds Trump associated with Jimmy-Hoffa linked Mafia figures, people from the milieu of Howard Hughes and Iran-Contra players such as Adnan Khashoggi. Trump has projected financier Carl Icahn as his Secretary of the Treasury, ignoring Icahn’s link to what Daniel has called “Cocaine One” and the mysterious, nefarious Skyway airlines. Trump’s Atlantic City deals involved mob-linked figures like Dan Sullivan, Kenneth Shapiro, “Fat Tony Salerno” and Nicky Scarfo. More significantly, the State of New Jersey, Atlantic City officials, and the Holiday Inn interests have aided Trump in highly questionable ways. In Las Vegas, Trump has been the heir to figures from the Meyer Lansky and Howard Hughes interests, such as Louis Lesser. Trump’s larger circle of friends links to individuals and institutions involved with the Marcos family in the Philippines, whose largesse derived from the Golden Lily loot secreted by the Japanese in World War II. Program Highlights Include: Craig Lesser (Louis Lesser’s son) and his role in accessing some of the Golden Lily loot in the Philippines; Iran-Contra figure Adnan Khashoggi’s sale of his personal yacht to Donald Trump; Khashoggi’s links to Imelda Marcos; Trump’s flipping of a luxury Palm Beach (Florida) property to Russian mobster Dimitry Rybolovlev; Trump’s use of “offshoring” tactics to render his dealings opaque.
  
  
  Red_Mariner • a day ago
  To give a better idea of Trumps thinking I’m surprised that no one in the media has brought up the so-called “wilding” incident in Central Park ,NYC in 1989.I remember how Trump was braying for the blood of the five accused youth.They were all eventually cleared of the charges.If it had been left up to Trump all five would have been dead and buried.
  
  
  VJP Red_Mariner • a day ago
  The Guardian brought it up, and there I learned that there’s a documentary “the Central Park 5”, by Ken Burns.
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  martinzl • 2 days ago
  Trump promises to make America great again. Maybe his election will be the final straw that will propel people to make the changes to the current corrupt system that will make Trump’s words prophetic.
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  gooddoctor • 2 days ago
  The guy is a puppet and very reminiscent of my “homey” ,the late crack-smoking Mayor of Toronto. Fascist Trump may be, but Hitler he is not, save for the ability to deliver denials with tears in his eyes. A Trump presidency would be like Rob Ford as mayor of Toronto. For the first year, the ruling class used Ford to carry through its program of cutbacks, then the late chief of police launched an incredibly expansive surveillance of a minor Somalian gang of kids, which produced an image of our mayor smoking a heroine/marijuana doobie and displaying an astonishing command of West Indian street slang. There are a lot of skeletons in Trump’s closet. Under attack, like Ford, his followers become stubborn and unyielding, which is ideal for the powers behind the curtain in municipal politics, or the deep state already in place in Washington
  It’s not widely known that in fact Toronto was not run by Ford whose own initiatives all failed, but by a strong man chosen by City Council. Trump will be, like Ford, the front men who will defer, executive style, to the political wiseguys.
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  лидия • 2 days ago
  Nothing surprising to me here. Now Trump is a “serious” candidate and he starts to behave as one – ie a dutiful member of capitalist ruling class.