Trump's actual record comes back to haunt him
This isn’t 2016 anymore.
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Donald Trump continued his Nazi-style rhetoric at his most recent campaign rally in Dayton, Ohio, warning that if he didn’t win the presidential election, “it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” He also referred to undocumented immigrants as “animals.”
“I don’t know if you call them people,” he said. “In some cases they’re not people, in my opinion. But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say.”
This was a familiarly repulsive throwback to Trump’s 2016 campaign, when he vowed to build a wall and keep out Mexican “rapists.” It’s an inconvenient fact for Republicans, but Trump was president for four years already. During that time, he definitely did not finish the wall (despite what he now claims) or solve the “border crisis” beyond mismanaging a pandemic so thoroughly that relatively few people wanted to come here the last year of his presidency. Nonetheless, Trump still wants to make immigration the defining issue of the 2024 election.
Immigration is Trump’s sweet spot. He can dehumanize brown people and advocate for harsh deportation policies that would require a rabid MAGA police state to implement. Immigration is also the one issue where Trump has most shaped the GOP into his own image. Sens. Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio once championed immigration reform but now parrot Trump’s “migrant invasion” rhetoric, and congressional Republicans last month tanked the border security bill of their dreams on Trump’s orders.
But in other ways, Trump in 2024 sounds remarkably more, well, traditional than he did in 2016, when he broke every norm on his way to winning the election. During his first campaign, he expressed little interest in reining in government spending, wasn’t big on free trade, and was more isolationist on foreign policy. He even called George W. Bush’s Iraq War a “big fat mistake.”
2016 Trump versus 2024 Trump
In 2016, Trump, as George W. Bush did in 2000, ran as a “different” type of Republican. Bush’s so-called “compassionate conservatism” was a stark contrast from Newt Gingrich’s harsh, aggressive “Republican revolution.”
Trump, despite his “you’re fired!” businessman persona, presented himself as a man of the people, albeit strictly white ones. His was a clear rejection of 2012 nominee Mitt Romney’s political persona, in tone but also in policy. Trump didn’t pretend that the Tea Party revolt was about “small government” so much as white cultural resentment. He seemed to grasp that mainstream Republican policies, both foreign and domestic, weren’t very popular.
Rust Belt voters who’d flipped from Barack Obama to Trump in 2016 believed he was different from the Republicans who still waved the Reagan banner. Trump’s “America First” rhetoric, while racist at its core, superficially stood in opposition to so-called “neoliberal” positions on immigration and foreign policy. Fast forward to 2024: Now, Trump has embraced the Republican elite’s policy preferences. His apparent shift on Social Security and Medicare is the biggest and perhaps most perilous example.
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Prior to his presidential run, Trump called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” in 2000 and recommended raising the retirement age to 70 because “we’re all living longer.” As president, he sought changes to Social Security and Medicare while attempting to blame Democrats. While running for re-election in 2020, he said he’d consider cutting entitlements to reduce the debt. Cut to 2024 and he attacked his primary opponents for even considering entitlement cuts.
But Trump’s recent interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box demonstrated why Trump rarely strays from doing fawning interviews on MAGA propaganda outlets like Fox News and Newsmax. Asked by conservative co-anchor Joe Kernan if he’d changed his “outlook on how to handle … Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,” Trump offered up a damaging gaffe.
Instead of a firm “no,” Trump responded by embracing entitlement cuts: “There’s 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 … There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do.”
Watch:
President Biden immediately pounced on Trump’s comments, responding tersely on social media, “Not on my watch.” Biden has proposed raising the annual payroll tax cap — currently $168,600 — to ensure Social Security’s solvency. That was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 plan, as well, and it would’ve resolved 88 percent of Social Security’s longterm funding issues — more than double the benefit from raising the retirement age. Republicans who prefer the latter solution are either bad at math or generally sadistic.
In 2016, Trump openly broke with Republican orthodoxy about Social Security and Medicare. Previously, Republicans had insisted that these entitlement programs were on the verge of financial collapse and painful cuts were necessary or they wouldn’t exist in another generation. Trump claimed that he wouldn’t lay a finger on Social Security but could guarantee that he’d keep them from going bankrupt — not that he has a stellar record of avoiding that outcome in his own business ventures.
“I am going to save Social Security without any cuts,” he declared in his usual carnival barker style. “I know where to get the money from. Nobody else does!”
During a 2016 GOP primary debate, Trump said, “I want to make our country rich again so we can afford it. We are going to be in a different world.” He seized Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric about cutting government “waste” while promising to play Santa Claus with the extra funds — a faux-populist spin on trickle-down economics. Presidential candidate Marco Rubio accused Trump of “fuzzy math” and said Social Security and Medicare cuts were unavoidable.
“If we do not do it,” Rubio warned, “we will have a debt crisis, not to mention a crisis in Social Security and Medicare.”
Former presidential candidates Nikki Haley and Mike Pence made similar arguments in the 2024 primary. They weren’t well received. Republicans have been slow to learn that voters aren’t supportive of significant changes to Social Security and Medicare. According to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from 2023, 79 percent of Americans oppose reducing Social Security benefits and 75 percent are against raising the eligibility age to 70 from 67. As someone once exclaimed at a 2009 Republican town hall, without any apparent irony, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!”
Trump understood the politics of Social Security and Medicare in 2016, but now, amid all his talk about terminating the Constitution and governing like a dictator, he somehow manages to sound like Paul Ryan. His overall position, though, has been incoherent.
After the Squawk Box interview, the Trump campaign insisted that Trump was “clearly talking about cutting waste, not entitlements.” They must hope voters have short memories. The GOP-controlled Congress tried to gut entitlements during Trump’s second year in office, and Trump’s proposed fiscal 2021 budget endorsed significant Social Security cuts for disabled seniors.
A few weeks ago, Trump reconciled with donors at the conservative Club for Growth, saying they’re “back in love.” The organization, which Trump used to demean as “the club for no growth,” had tried to prevent him from winning the GOP nomination, but he’s in dire need of its deep pockets. The Club for Growth supports entitlement cuts, and while we don’t know the exact terms of their reconciliation, it’s always safe to assume that Trump acts in his own self-interest not from any consistent political ideology.
Trump drops the ball on abortion, health care
Case in point: Trump was openly pro-choice during the 1990s but embraced the GOP’s anti-abortion position when he first ran for president. He showed some glimpses of moderation on the issue early in his 2016 campaign, at one point defending Planned Parenthood — a longtime Republican bogeyman — at a CNN debate in Houston.
“Millions of millions of women — cervical cancer, breast cancer — are helped by Planned Parenthood,” Trump said in 2016. “I would defund it because I’m pro-life, but millions of women are helped by Planned Parenthood.”
Trump did walk into a rake when he suggested women should face “some form of punishment” for having an abortion. That proved disturbingly prescient, as post-Roe, Republican-run states have prosecuted women for “unlawful abortions.” A few weeks after the 2016 punishment gaffe, Trump told the Today show’s Savannah Guthrie that the official GOP platform should include exceptions for rape and incest in its anti-abortion policy. NPR reported this as “Trump Calls For GOP To Moderate Its Position On Abortion.”
Now, after boasting about nominating the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, Trump can’t realistically present himself as a moderate on abortion. He’s just another Republican on the matter. His daughter and former adviser Ivanka Trump helped him fool the media about being a moderate image on social issues, including LGBTQ rights, but she’s missing for action for this campaign. It would’ve been difficult anyway to fool voters after Trump stacked the courts with anti-queer judges and tried to ban trans citizens from the military.
Meanwhile, with uninsured rates at historic lows, health care isn’t as salient an issue as it was before Biden took office. But Trump has a record here too. Like every Republican candidate in 2016, he vowed to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, but he also promised to keep everything voters had grown to like about the ACA, specifically protections for people with preexisting conditions. Campaign Trump’s health care proposals were a jumbled mishmash of double talk that might’ve fooled voters, but President Trump had to actually pass something. He not only failed to repeal the ACA, but his actual plan would’ve denied health care to at least 24 million Americans.
Health care and abortion have both joined entitlement reform on what Kernan called the “third-rail” of US politics. Yet Trump can’t quit falling onto it. Last year, he stunned Senate Republicans, eager to reclaim the majority, when he announced that he’d give overhauling health care another shot. Trump’s ego won’t move past Republican Sen. John McCain voting at the last minute to kill his ACA repeal effort, but outgoing Republican Leader Mitch McConnell shrugged off his health care vendetta, saying earlier this month, “If [Trump] can develop a base for revisiting that issue, obviously we’d take a look at it, but it seems to me that’s largely over.”
Trump can’t survive first contact with mainstream media
The thing about Trump gaffing so hard on CNBC during his first interview with a quasi-legit media outlet in six months is that it showed how difficult it is for him to handle basic questions from an interlocutor who has goals beyond slathering him with Dear Leader-style praise.
The popular (yet consistently debunked) Republican narrative is that Biden’s senile and doesn’t dare engage substantively with the press. But in reality Trump is the one who requires on-site child care supervision from friendly right-wing media. He often falls apart and rambles nonsensically during the most basic of interviews.
Two days after his damaging CNBC appearance, Trump went on Newsmax and served up a word salad about Hillary Clinton destroying classified materials using “acid” that allegedly can “destroy everything within 10 miles.” It was bonkers stuff, but cult TV host Greg Kelly just nodded along (watch the clip below).
If Republicans claim they are choosing this brain worm victim because of Biden’s cognitive issues, they’re lying to you.
This is why Trump is so comfortable at his rallies, where no one asks him questions and he can free associate hatred about immigrants and his political enemies. Trump’s “bloodbath” comments led to much debate over whether he was literally calling for violence or claiming that Biden’s economic policies would wreck the auto industry. What was lost in all the semantics is that Trump’s proposed policies are absurd. It’s all strongman bluster where brute force wins out over skilled negotiation. He’s threatened 100 percent tariffs on automobiles made outside the US, but his last trade war as president cost Americans $230 billion.
Trump isn’t really running for president. He’s campaigning for dictator. As was the case in 2016, he’ll say whatever’s necessary to win. But now he has a record that undercuts his talking points and will provide fodder for Democratic ads all year.
That’s it for this week
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We’ll be back with more Monday. Until then, have a great weekend.
Thank you for summarizing and articulating this so well. "Trump campaigning for dictator" is the best description of his efforts!
Trump is asked serious specific questions, like on CNBC video here about Social Security cuts and his position, having tacked from one side to another. His responses always are vague; he using superlative language ('there's tremendous things, a lot of things you can do... bad management) to say NOTHING. And yet these anchors treat him seriously. He's a FAKE!!!