GOP platform breaks Trump’s 'no cuts' promise on Social Security and Medicare

Rss@dailykos.com (jon Perr) · Sunday, July 24, 2016, 3:38 pm

If nothing else, Republicans used their convention in Cleveland to get their hate on. The delegates who cheered Chris Christie's ersatz prosecution of Hillary Clinton had already made "lock her up" the event's lasting sound bite. Offstage, Trump surrogates accused Clinton of "treason" and called for her execution by hanging or firing squad. The foaming at the mouth crowd raged about "radical Islam," an all-encompassing enemy they could neither describe nor explain how to defeat. Meanwhile, the delegates approved a platform which would bestow 14th Amendment protections to fetuses while denying them to actual, living LGBT Americans.

But if Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign ushered in the era of "Post-Truth Politics," Donald Trump's coronation marked the rise of the "No Policy Candidate." For example, on Wednesday, advisers Stephen Moore and Lawrence Kudlow announced their proposed overhaul of Trump's gigantic tax cut windfall for the wealthy, supposedly reducing his Treasury-draining from $10 trillion to $3 trillion over the next decade. But even more telling when it comes to Donald Trump's disinterest in actual policy is what the 2016 Republican Party platform declared about health care and retirement income for future seniors. After a year of promising Americans he would "save Social Security and Medicare without cuts," nominee Trump looked the other way as his party's platform endorsed House Speaker Paul Ryan's plans to gut both.

Next week in Philadelphia, Democrat Hillary Clinton will tout her proposal to expand Social Security financing and benefits, a position enjoying growing support in Washington. And from the moment he jumped into the GOP race, Donald Trump made clear he would oppose any reductions to the pension plan for more than 60 million Americans. In an April 2016 ad, the reality TV star turned GOP frontrunner pledged he would "save Social Security and Medicare without cuts." As he put it at a December 11, 2015 rally in Iowa:

"So, you've been paying into Social Security and Medicare...but we are not going to cut your Social Security and we're not cutting your Medicare. We are going to take jobs back from all these countries that are ripping us off and we are going to become a wealthy country again. And we are going to be able to save your Social Security. We are not taking it...so there is tremendous waste, fraud, and abuse. What we are going to do is we're going to save Medicare, we're going to save Social Security, we are not going to raise the age, and we're not going to do all the things that everybody else is talking about doing. They are all talking about doing it and you don't have to."
And Trump's commitment to the two programs keeping millions of America's seniors from poverty did not just stem from his belief that "people have a contract." As he explained after meeting with Speak Ryan back in May, his "no cuts" position combined moral principle and political expediency:

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