This represented a major about-face. Trump had spent much of the GOP primary campaign insisting he was the one candidate who wouldn’t take an ax to popular entitlement programs. Indeed, his position on this issue helped him win the presidential nomination back in 2016, and surely helped again this year. Cutting Medicare and Social Security is a long-standing priority for Republican donors—but it’s deeply unpopular with the general public.
Granted, when asked about his actual policies, Trump usually replies with a word salad: grand but vague statements about the “tremendous amounts of things … you can do.” Trump’s recent comments on entitlements may simply represent his thinking poorly on his feet—after all, his campaign tried to walk it back soon after, saying that the former president was only talking about “cutting waste.” But there’s good reason to believe that Trump would float cutting entitlements—particularly to wealthy Republican donors, now that he is in desperate need of money.
Trump’s entire political identity is based on the false premise that he is an outsider, someone not beholden to any political establishment or creed. In 2016, he won the presidency by campaigning against both the liberal order, represented by Hillary Clinton, and the conservative one, represented by Jeb Bush, the exact kind of Republican who would run on “reforming” entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. But now that Trump is deeply in the red, one can expect more flip-flops like this. He badly needs big donors—and he’s clearly willing to change policy proposals on a host of issues, from China to entitlements, to get them.