It's unclear if President Donald Trump is trying to lose the 2020 election or he's simply spitballing with right-wing conservatives, but his latest idea is to gut Medicare in his second term according to the New York Times.
During the 2016 campaign there were at least six occasions in which Trump promised he would protect Medicare.
"I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid. Every other Republican is going to cut, and even if they wouldn’t, they don’t know what to do because they don’t know where the money is. I do," Trump told right-wing publication The Daily Signal.
But according to Vanity Fair, Trump is now telling friends it might be fun to kill the program to meet his campaign promise that he would zero-out the deficit. Thursday it was revealed that the federal deficit will come dangerously close to $1 trillion by the 2019 fiscal end.
"We’ve got to fix that,” Sen. John Thune (R-SD) told the New York Times. “It’s going to take presidential leadership to do that, and it’s going to take courage by the Congress to make some hard votes. We can’t keep kicking the can down the road. I hope in a second term, he is interested. With his leadership, I think we could start dealing with that crisis. And it is a crisis.”
Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), explained that he has regular chats with Trump and that he's “brought it up with President Trump, who has talked about it being a second-term project.”
You can watch Trump promise he'll never cut Medicare in the video below.