Donald Trump raised the idea of cutting entitlements in a March 2024 interview with CNBC. His presidential administration also submitted budgets every year that proposed cuts both to Medicare and Social Security …
… but the cuts never passed through Congress. Also his comments on CNBC directly contradicted the Republican platform and his campaign website. He walked back the assertion he made during the interview several days later.
Beginning in March 2024, Democrats claimed that former U.S. President Donald Trump had vowed to cut Medicare and Social Security should he be reelected president in November 2024. On March 12, 2024, California Gov. Gavin Newsom shared a 21-second clip on TikTok from an interview Trump gave on CNBC the day before:
After President Joe Biden abandoned his plans for reelection and Vice President Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee, she repeated the claim during a July 30, 2024, rally in Atlanta:
Twelve minutes into her speech, she mentioned Project 2025, a proposed conservative blueprint for a future Republican administration. "Project 2025 is a plan to weaken the middle class, be clear," Harris said. "And Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare."
It is true that Trump evoked the idea of cutting entitlements during his interview with CNBC. Here what he said about the topic, in full:
So, first of all, 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. Tremendous amounts of things — numbers of things you can do.
It was not the first time he had brought up that idea. He did it several times in 2020 during his failed campaign for reelection. During a town hall on Fox News in March 2020, here was his response to the interviewer:
Martha MacCallum: But if you don't cut something in entitlements, you'll never really deal with that.
Donald Trump: Well, we'll be cutting, but we're also going to have growth like you've never had before.
It is also true that each of the budgets the Trump administration submitted while in the White House proposed cuts both to Medicare and Social Security, though none of these cuts passed in Congress.
However, the Republican platform for a second Trump presidency explicitly said the party will protect Medicare and Social Security. Page 16 reads:
President Trump has made absolutely clear that he will not cut one penny from Medicare or Social Security. American Citizens work hard their whole lives, contributing to Social Security and Medicare.
Three days after Trump made those comments on CNBC, he spoke to Breitbart, the far-right news site, confirming the platform's promise. "I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare," he said. "We'll have to do it elsewhere. But we're not going to do anything to hurt them."
The promise appears on a separate part of the Trump campaign website. The page shows a video in which Trump repeats the services should be protected. "Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security," he said.
We therefore deem the claim a mixture of true and false.