A common refrain heard from the Anti-Anti-Trump, “it’s the policies, not the personalities” crowd, is that we shouldn’t trust anonymous predictions about how bad things would be if Trump is elected. There are usually two reasons: (1) these are all nameless enemies of the former President, and (2) the most dire predictions about how his first term would go did not come true. Leaving aside all the predictions that have come true (for example, Trump’s Tariffs contributing to Inflation, his tax cuts ballooning the deficit, and his trade war harming some of the rural Americans who support him), they might have a bit of a point that some people who were opposed to Trump were motivated to exaggerate their predictions. But what happens when Trump’s friends and advisors start making predictions about “necessary hardships” in a second Trump term?
As I touched on in a post from yesterday, a number of Trump advisors, supporters, and apparently future administration members, have made comments about what may happen in the immediate future if Trump is elected. Benjy Sarlin from Semfor has captured a number of these in an article entitled: Donald Trump’s friends are making big plans. Democrats are taking notice. He begins with Elon Musk:
Elon Musk is suddenly going into more detail about his planned position in a government efficiency commission for Trump, with talk of reducing annual spending by $2 trillion — a figure that would almost certainly require deep cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, even before trying to reconcile it with Trump’s multi-trillion dollar tax promises. Not only that, he’s been warning that the economy will suffer “temporary hardship” before voters see the benefits of a Trump/Musk agenda. That included a prediction that “markets will tumble” at first, he said on X, not something the Dow-obsessed Trump typically wants to hear.
This year’s Federal Budget is approximately $6.75 trillion dollars. As Sarlin notes, there is no way to trim $2 trillion out of federal funding without touching social safety net (often referred to as “entitlement”) programs and military spending. The hitch with that is Republicans don’t want the services they need cut. Some mistakenly believe that eliminating undocumented and legal immigrants will somehow make up that gap, but that isn’t the case (especially as undocumented immigrants cannot access Federal Safety Net Programs). Also any market crash would also negatively impact retires with stock-based retirement savings.
But it’s not just Musk. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is also sharing what Trump has promised him:
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — a critical Trump endorsement for voters on the margins of party politics — has been boasting about a massive “promised” role in the next Trump administration. On Monday, he said in a livestream that he would have “control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH and a few others, and then also the USDA.”
While the Trump campaign has tried to walk this back, the way it did so doesn’t really increase my confidence about the influence the notoriously anti-Vaxx and anti-Pharmaceutical RFK Jr. will have over the administration’s health care policy (again, we’re talking about policy, not personalities):
Howard Lutnick, Trump’s transition co-chair, told CNN Wednesday night that Kennedy would not lead the HHS while echoing Kennedy’s view that vaccines cause autism after a 2.5-hour meeting with him. The alleged link between vaccines and autism has been extensively studied and never proven.
For the record, Trump has gone on record at multiple campaign events, stating that he would block federal funding for school districts that have vaccination requirements. NOT COVID vaccination requirements. ANY VACCINATION REQUIREMENTS.
I see no way that this can go wrong.
Then we get to Mike Johnson:
Speaker Mike Johnson, meanwhile, reopened a simmering debate over the Affordable Care Act that other Republicans have been wary to discuss when he told a voter in Pennsylvania that overhauling health care would be “a big part of the agenda” next year. When the same voter followed up “No Obamacare?” Johnson replied: “No Obamacare. The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we’ve got a lot of ideas on how to do that.”
ACA reform might not seem like it’s as much of a threat to Republicans and Trump supporters. However, there are two realities they need to contend with. Much like Trump’s Infrastructure plans from his first term, his proposal to replace/reform the ACA was never released. So, no one knows what “massive reform” means. Secondly, replacing/reforming the ACA was a core part of the Trump platform in 2016 and resulted in a massive failure for the administration.
To be fair to the Trump Campaign, it denied they have plans to repeal the ACA. From MSNBC news:
Even Trump’s campaign distanced itself from Johnson’s comment. “Repealing Obamacare is not President Trump’s policy position,” campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said.
However, there was no discussion about possible repeals to the ACA. It’s entirely possible to gut an act without repealing it (as we have seen with the constant chipping away at the Voter Rights Act). Either way, I for one choose to take these warnings LITERALLY versus figuratively (especially as they align with a lot of expert consensus of what would happen AND, in some cases, Trump’s own rhetoric).
