Trump’s wheelchair-over-the-cliff attack
Byron York
TRUMP’S WHEELCHAIR-OVER-THE-CLIFF ATTACK. On Tuesday morning, former President Donald Trump went on the attack, again, against Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL). DeSantis, of course, has not revealed whether he is running for the Republican nomination for president in 2024, but nearly everything he has done in public lately points toward a run. The polls show DeSantis as Trump’s only real competition in the race at this point. In a recent Fox News poll, Trump leads DeSantis 43% to 28%, with the next-highest candidates, Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, at 7% each.
So on Tuesday morning, Trump went after DeSantis. And the way he did it is worth noting. Here is what the former president wrote on his social media site Truth Social, with capitalization and punctuation from the original:
Great Poll numbers are springing forth for your favorite President, me, against Ron DeSanctus (& Biden). I guess people are finding out that he wanted to CUT SOCIAL SECURITY & RAISE THE MINIMUM AGE TO AT LEAST 70, at least 4 times. LIKEWISE WITH MEDICARE, WANTED BIG CUTS. HE IS A WHEELCHAIR OVER THE CLIFF KIND OF GUY, JUST LIKE HIS HERO, failed politician Paul Ryan, the Fox News ratings destroyer who led Mitt Romney’s Presidential Campaign down the tubes. GLOBALIST’S ALL! WE WANT AMERICA FIRST!!!
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What to make of that? First, give Trump points for the nickname game. A few months ago, he tried to label DeSantis “Ron DeSanctimonious,” but it seemed overly long and clunky. It did not flow off the tongue. So now Trump has refined the nickname to “Ron DeSanctus,” which is not only easier to say but also sounds kind of holy, which may or may not be what Trump intends.
But most of Trump’s attack on DeSantis sounded very…Democratic. Accusing Republicans of wanting to cut, or completely eliminate, Medicare and Social Security? That could have come from the Democratic attack machine any time in the last 50 years. In fact, Trump’s attack resembled, in spirit at least, President Joe Biden’s taunting of Republicans at the State of the Union address on Feb. 7, when he accused the GOP of seeking to kill Medicare and Social Security.
In that episode, Biden claimed that “some” Republicans want to “sunset” Medicare and Social Security, by which he meant they want to see those programs expire. Biden was distorting the meaning of Sen. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) election agenda, which called for the sunset and renewal of federal programs deemed valuable after a mandatory review every five years.
In a newsletter on the issue, I wrote: “The fact is, Democrats have long accused Republicans of wanting to kill Medicare and Social Security. In 2012, they made an ad depicting then-Rep. Paul Ryan, at the time Sen. Mitt Romney’s vice presidential running mate, pushing a terrified grandmother in a wheelchair off a cliff. They really did that. You can watch it today — it’s actually funny. But it was only a tiny bit more extreme than the accusations Democrats have actually leveled at Republicans over the years.”
In other words, the wheelchair-off-the-cliff ad is widely remembered as an example of the insane extremism of Democratic accusations against Republicans. And now a Republican former president, running for the White House again, has adopted it. It’s an extraordinary development in GOP politics.
It is an unfortunate economic and demographic fact that, if left on their current courses, Medicare and Social Security will both go broke in the coming decade — Medicare in about 2030, depending on events, and Social Security in about 2035. Something has to be done to ensure their solvency. Republicans have been the only party responsible enough, or reckless enough, to suggest reforms that would lengthen the life of both programs. For their efforts, they have faced relentless attacks from Democrats.
It’s a truism in Washington that the government does not really address problems until they become crises. That’s just the way things work. Some Republicans, such as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), have realized that is true of Medicare and Social Security and have backed away from advocating reforms until Democrats, someday, agree that the situation is serious enough to take action.
That has created a dilemma for Republicans in presidential politics. Many, including McCarthy, realize that “entitlement reform,” as fixing Medicare and Social Security is sometimes known, is an electoral loser. Voters, and indeed the entire political system, are just not ready to face the problem right now. Why advocate it, only to get beaten up and lose in the end? Trump knew that as a candidate in 2016.
Indeed, what might be called Ryanism, a relentless focus on fiscal issues with a heavy component of entitlement reform, is nearly dead in the Republican Party. Someday, some new version of it will come back, when Medicare and Social Security are staring bankruptcy in the face. But now — no.
Still, why trash those Republicans who stuck their necks out to advocate reform in the past? It didn’t work, the political world moved on, and Medicare and Social Security are now “off the table,” in McCarthy’s words, until they are back on the table. In the meantime, Trump is sounding a lot like Democrats in 2012 — or Joe Biden today.
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