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Donald Trump made some news Monday when the conversation in a seemingly innocuous CNBC interview turned to the national debt, and whether he’d be willing to cut entitlements like Social Security and Medicare to reduce it.
“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,” said Trump, the GOP’s presumptive nominee for the White House. “There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do.”
Even loose talk of touching Medicare and Social Security can be politically toxic in America, especially for Republicans, who have a long record of seeking to privatize the beloved programs or reduce their benefits. Almost immediately ― and in response to attacks from President Joe Biden ― Trump’s campaign put out the word that he simply meant he’d cut down on waste and inefficiency.
A day later, Trump was on the defensive during an interview with Breitbart News. “I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare,” he said.
With most politicians, you could try to parse these statements, hoping to divine some insights about their true intentions and values. But Trump is not a normal politician. He rarely talks about policy and, in instances like these when he does, his statements are so hazy and full of malapropisms that they could mean almost anything.
It’s great material for “Saturday Night Live.” But if you’re a voter trying to figure out what matters to Trump or what decisions he’d make in office, you’re basically out of luck. And although an inability to speak cogently about important issues might seem like a political liability, for Trump it may actually be an asset, because it obscures his more unpopular positions.
That’s arguably what happened in 2016. And it…
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