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The Trump administration is setting records and shattering norms in many ways, including in its almost daily policy flip-flops and rhetorical missteps. The latest started on Monday, when Elon Musk torched Trumpism by trumpeting the need to make cuts in federal entitlement programs.
He did not clearly say whether or how those cuts would affect Medicaid, Medicare and social security benefits. But he was clear that those programs will be on his target list.
Entitlements are “the big one to eliminate,” he told Larry Kudlow, an economic adviser during Donald Trump’s first term, on Fox Business Network. “Maybe half a trillion or $600, $700bn a year.”
Throughout the 2024 campaign, the president promised not to cut social security and Medicare benefits. Even so, Musk appeared to tee up changes to those programs.
He called entitlements “a mechanism by which the Democrats attract and retain illegal immigrants by essentially paying them to come here and then turning them into voters”.
“That’s why,” he continued, “Democrats are so upset about this situation. If we turn off this gigantic money magnet for illegal immigrants, then they will leave and they will lose voters.”
As the AP notes in its report on the Musk-Kudlow interview: “The allegation echoed the ‘great replacement’ theory which claims that politicians are trying to expand their power by reshaping the country’s racial demographics.” Pinning the blame for entitlement cuts on undocumented immigrants is a Trumpist way of stoking the base, even as Musk lays the groundwork for making the lives of many Maga loyalists more difficult.
The red meat Musk tossed to hardcore, anti-immigrant voters will not long be satisfactory if he follows through on cuts to programs on which many of them depend. In addition, Musk’s musings about entitlements will drive home the widening split between its plutocratic and populist wings.
Last month, Steve Bannon, representing the populist wing of the Maga movement, gave a taste of what is to come in Trumpland when he warned that Republicans making cuts to Medicaid would affect members of Trump’s fan club.
As the New Republic puts it: “On the Thursday episode of War Room, while gushing over massive government spending cuts, Bannon warned that cutting Medicaid specifically would prove unpopular among the working-class members of Trump’s base, who make up some of the 80 million people who get their healthcare through that program.”
“Medicaid,” Bannon warned, “you got to be careful, because a lot of Maga’s on Medicaid. I’m telling you, if you don’t think so, you are deeeeeead wrong. Medicaid is going to be a complicated one. Just can’t take a meat ax to it, although I would love to.”
And it is not just Medicaid that has strong support. Polls have “consistently shown that the American public strongly supports social security, across party and demographic lines”, per the National Academy of Social Insurance.
A 2024 survey found “87 percent of Americans agree that social security should remain a priority for the nation no matter the state of budget deficits, and this support holds strong across party affiliation. Ninety per cent of Democrats, 86% of Republicans, and 88% of independents support keeping social security a priority.”
In the wake of the November election, a Pew survey reported: “Republicans and Democrats have long differed over the size and scope of government, and that continued that continued in this election cycle.” But “large majorities of Trump (77%) and Harris supporters (83%) opposed any reductions in the social security program.”
The president prepared the way for Musk’s remarks during his recent address to Congress when he delivered a litany of false claims about people receiving social security benefits well beyond anyone’s capacity to live. Musk followed suit with what he said about undocumented immigrants getting federal entitlement benefits.
The fact is that if they work, they pay into the social security system, but they are not eligible to receive benefits. As KFF, a health policy research, polling and news organization, explains: “Undocumented immigrants are not eligible to enroll in federally funded coverage including Medicaid, Chip, or Medicare.”
We got a glimpse of the trouble that Musk caused in Magaworld when, the day after his remarks, the White House tried to clean up the mess. It issued a press release saying: “The Trump administration will not cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits. President Trump himself has said it (over and over and over again).”
Then, never missing a chance to bash the media, the White House insisted: “Elon Musk didn’t say that, either. The press is lying again.” The press release also insisted that Musk was only talking about plans to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse.
The Musk-led assault on the federal government may talk a lot about doing so, but that is a cover for a bigger project. As professor Jack Schneider observes: “We all know that there are ways our government could become more efficient or more effective. But this project isn’t really about trimming the fat – it’s about cutting you loose.”
The Trump-Musk project is also designed to cripple government agencies, deprive government of the funds it needs to deliver necessary services, and further erode the public’s trust in government.
That is why Musk has not been shy about denigrating the entire social security system, calling it a “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all times”. The White House effort to whitewash Musk’s faux pas is another example of the continuing saga of its baffling inability to get its story straight.
The president may think that he gets more than he loses from his “billionaire in a china-shop” sidekick. But, in the end, while Trump may survive his association with the Musk, Trumpism may not.
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Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 hundred books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty
