Democrats should be shouting from the rooftops about the threat to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Vice President JD Vance and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) applaud as US President Donald Trump speaks during an address to a joint session of Congress on March 4, 2025.
(Win McNamee / Pool / AFP via Getty Images)
Donald Trump narrowly won the 2024 election after promising that he would fix an economy that he insisted was on life support. Yet, in the first address of his second presidential term to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, Trump barely discussed this supposedly fundamental concern—even though the economy is dramatically more troubled today than it was when Joe Biden left office.
Glossing over issues such as resurgent inflation, stalling job grown and the fact that trade-war jitters had just caused the Dow to drop 1,300 points in two days, Trump instead devoted inordinate amounts of his speech to fawning remarks about billionaire Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn assault on federal agencies, objections to transgender athletes, and gripes that Democrats didn’t want to clap for him. As a USA Today headline announced, “Trump’s Speech Was All About Dodging Responsibility for the Economy He’s Crashing.” Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett complained that, in a 99-minute-long address, “Trump spent 1 minute and 25 seconds on inflation and prices—and used the entire section to blame [former President] Biden. Zero solutions, zero policy announcements,” while Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said, ”I did not hear one word from Trump tonight about the economic reality facing 60 percent of our people [who live paycheck to paycheck], or the enormous stress that they are living under.”
But Trump did find time to speak, at considerable length. about how he thinks the nation’s Social Security Administration is a chaotic mess of waste, fraud and abuse. Claiming to have uncovered “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program,” the president repeated disproven assertions and outright lies in a speech that suggested that millions of Americans must be gaming the system. “Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security numbers for people aged 100 to 109 years old,” Trump claimed. CNN fact checkers immediately explained, “The vast majority of these people do not have dates of death listed in Social Security’s database. But that doesn’t mean they are actually receiving monthly benefits. Public data from the Social Security Administration shows that about 89,000 people age 99 or over were receiving Social Security benefits in December 2024, not even close to the millions Trump invoked.”
Trump is no fool. He knew serious media outlets would challenge the false premises of his remarks before he left the Capitol. So why cast so much shade on a program he claims to support? And why devote so much of this major speech to fantastical claims about Social Security “fraud” involving people claiming to be 150, 200 or older?
Longtime defenders of Social Security have an unsettling answer to that question.
“Trump is spewing misinformation about Social Security so he can ultimately justify cutting your benefits,” argued US Representative Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat who is a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee. Former secretary of labor Robert Reich explained, “Trump keeps spreading lies about Social Security. What he isn’t telling you is that he’s actively trying to dismantle it—firing thousands of SSA employees and shuttering regional offices. Why? To pave the way for privatization so Wall Street can gamble with our retirement.”
Republicans have a long history on scheming to privatize Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. But the focus of Trump’s speech suggests that the threat is now far more real—and imminent.
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Addressing that threat must become an urgent priority for congressional Democrats, and grassroots activists.
To her credit, Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) warned in her relatively cautious official response to the address, “President Trump is trying to deliver an unprecedented giveaway to his billionaire friends. He’s on the hunt to find trillions of dollars to pass along to the wealthiest in America. And to do that, he’s going to make you pay in every part of your life. Grocery and home prices are going up, not down—and he hasn’t laid out a credible plan to deal with either. His tariffs on allies like Canada will raise prices on energy, lumber, cars—and start a trade war that will hurt manufacturing and farmers. Your premiums and prescriptions will cost more because the math on his proposals doesn’t work without going after your health care. Meanwhile, for those keeping score, the national debt is going up, not down. And if he’s not careful, he could walk us right into a recession.”
But only in what sounded a bit like an afterthought did Slotkin say, “And one more thing: In order to pay for his plan, he could very well come after your retirement—the Social Security, Medicare, and VA benefits you worked your whole life to earn. The President claims he won’t, but Elon Musk just called Social Security ‘the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.’” Slotkin was right about Musk, who has emerged as the prime mover in the administration’s radical assault on government programs. But she should have made the issue far more central to her address.
Sander hit harder in his livestreamed response, where he ripped into Trump for peddling “a set of ideas that either have no basis in reality” and said, “Trump claimed that millions of dead people between the ages of 100 and 360 were collecting Social Security checks. That is an outrageous lie intended to lay the groundwork for cuts to Social Security and dismantling the most successful and popular government program in history. Let’s be clear: Well over 99 percent of Social Security checks are going out to people who earned those checks—70 million people. Nobody who is 150 years old or 200 years old or 300 years old is receiving Social Security checks.”
After decrying Republican budget plans that would slash Medicaid in order to fund tax cuts for the rich as “the Robin Hood principle in reverse—taking from the poor and giving to the rich,” Sanders returned to the issue of Social Security, saying, “No, we’re not going to cut Social Security. Quite the contrary, we must expand Social Security benefits and extend its solvency for the next 75 years by scrapping the cap that allows a billionaire to pay the same amount into Social Security as a truck driver.”
That was the right message. But now it must be amplified—boldly, loudly, and unapologetically—by a united Democratic opposition. That’s what Nancy Pelosi and her caucus did in 2005, when Republican President George W. Bush moved to privatize parts of Social Security. Not only did the Democrats win that fight, they helped hasten the political downfall of Bush’s congressional allies. Representative Al Green, a 77-year-old Democrat from Texas, was removed from the chamber Tuesday night, after he shook his cane at the president and shouted, “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid.” Speaking to reporters about Republican threats to censure him, Green declared, “I’ll accept the punishment. It’s worth it to let people know that there’s some of us who are going to stand up to against this president’s desire to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.”
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It has to be more than “some of us.” It must be every Democrat. With Social Security, a program that is vital to the overwhelming majority of Americans, under the looming threat of Elon Musk’s chain saw, the stakes are too high for anything less.
Donald Trump’s cruel and chaotic second term is just getting started. In his first month back in office, Trump and his lackey Elon Musk (or is it the other way around?) have proven that nothing is safe from sacrifice at the altar of unchecked power and riches.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
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