Does Donald Trump want to cut Social Security?

When Donald Trump makes a threat, I take it as a promise. The man is so associated with stretching, twisting, and outright ignoring the truth that many write his concerning statements off as exaggerations, but history proves that flippancy wrong.

Remember when Trump threatened to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, which seeks to combat the ever-rising risks of global climate change through mitigation? He followed through on that promise in 2020. Thankfully, we re-entered the deal under President Biden, but had Trump secured another term in office, we’d still be producing emissions, unchecked, in a year in which global temperatures are once again breaking records.

That’s a trend across Trump’s political career. He made threats across his campaign for president, and once he’d taken office, he followed through on almost all of them. He did it in a sloppy way that consistently failed to properly work, but he made the effort nonetheless.

This fact is at the forefront of voters’ minds as they consider another Trump threat, this time from his 2024 campaign for president. The disgraced former U.S. leader made a threat to our nation’s Social Security recently, and I’m inclined to believe him.

What did Trump say about Social Security?

Donald Trump made several controversial comments regarding entitlement programs in mid-March, causing a brief panic, before promptly walking those same statements back. This follows a common trend for the former president, who’s known to make bold, broad threats only to flip flop when those threats emerge as unpopular. He doesn’t do things because he thinks they’re good for the country, he does them because he thinks they’re good for him. And if they’re not, he couldn’t care less.

That’s generally what happened with the Social Security threat. Trump broadly discussed cuts to entitlement programs, were he to be elected again, and sparked a widespread panic. He told CNBC that “there is 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 — tremendous bad management of entitlements — there’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do.”

It’s always hard to parse Trump’s words, considering how much unnecessary blather is mixed in with his actual talking points, but the chatter about cutting entitlements was more than enough to indicate danger to Social Security. It was enough to prompt a response from President Biden, promising to protect Social Security, and even prompted Trump to walk his own statements back.

Will Trump really cut Social Security if elected?

It’s hard to anticipate what Trump will do. The man is less an enigma, more a chicken with his head cut off, but he’s still damn hard to track when he’s on a tangent. So, while I would typically encourage every American to take the man at his word when he makes a threat, I’m less certain on this one.

Certainly we shouldn’t let our guards down, but at the end of the day I think the chances of Trump cutting Social Security are extremely low. In the wake of his statement to CNBC the move was promptly exposed as hugely unpopular among Americans, and that could hurt his chances. That, paired with his prompt attempt to backpedal, indicates that Trump is already rethinking that particular cut.

Trump noted, in the wake of pushback over his Social Security claims, that he was never discussing entitlement programs, but instead general government spending. According to Trump’s team, he’s not eyeing Social Security for a cut, but he does think government spending in general needs to be slashed. That walk-back, paired with the prompt backlash his initial statement received, are likely more than enough to ensure that Trump stays far from Social Security, but there’s no one quite as unpredictable as Trump. You never truly know what the man will do.