Yesterday I excoriated Politico for a deeply ingenuous report on GOP Medicaid cuts, now presenting the matter as something congressional Republicans are trying to foist on a skeptical Trump. I also said that they were making up the idea that Trump has repeatedly pledged never to touch Medicaid as he has repeatedly promised not to tamper with Social Security and Medicare.
I should have remembered that Trump has said so many different things and so many contradictory things over his decade in politics that saying he’s “never” said something is stepping out onto a weak branch indeed. Because he did actually say it.
What he has usually and very consistently said is that he won’t ever cut Social Security and Medicare. You know, the ones good people use. But he did include Medicaid more than a few times. He actually said it when he was launching his first time, as a way to distinguish himself from other Republicans. Then after he was elected he immediately tried to push through massive cuts to Medicaid, both in the form of abolishing Obamacare (and thus Medicaid expansion) and other cuts to classic Medicaid directly. Here’s a good piece on it from Vox which goes into the initial promises and then efforts to slash Medicaid a year later. That was back in 2017. So any way that’s the qualification/correction. You know, the kind of correction in which I’m still mostly right. Kinda. 😉
