President Donald Trump is betraying his voters in a way that could hurt Republicans in future elections, but a conservative commentators doubts whether they will capitalize on it.“It happened on Wednesday, during a private Easter luncheon at the White House,” wrote The Bulwark’s Jonathan Cohn. He quoted Trump as admitting that because of Republican support for the military-industrial complex, “we can’t take care of daycare,” that states which want to support their citizens will “have to raise their taxes” and that “Medicaid” and “Medicare” are also on the chopping block. all these individual things.“Typically, Republican leaders try very hard to deny they are starving social programs to fund the military, leaving Democrats to make the case on their own,” Cohn wrote. “Yet here was Trump coming right out and saying it. And while the president frequently blurts out statements that have no bearing on reality, in this case his description of how he’d like to rearrange federal spending priorities was pretty much on the nose.”Even though Cohn argued Democrats could bring up Trump’s statement right here to win future elections, he doubts if they’ll capitalize on the opportunity.“Whether that registers politically is a separate question,” Cohn wrote. “It depends on whether voters link their hardship to decisions that Trump and his Republican allies have made, which depends in part on whether Democrats can show the link exists. But Trump’s daycare riff on Wednesday makes that easy. Democrats can just run ads playing his remarks, verbatim.”He added, “The president gave them a gift. The one who occupied the Oval Office ten years ago never would have made that mistake.” Cohn had this observation about Trump from 2016 because, as he pointed out earlier in the editorial, “a lot of this was about trade, war, and immigration—how, as Trump told it, Republican elites had bankrupted the country with foreign interventions and sold out working Americans by shipping jobs over to China, all while allowing the country to be overrun with dangerous immigrants stealing everyday jobs. But Trump went out of his way to say he disagreed with the GOP establishment on matters of the welfare state as well.”Trump and members of his administration have let the mask slip on his social agenda on other occasions. Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, aroused controversy in November when he appeared on CNN and said he supports health saving accounts (or HSAs), or personalized accounts set up to help cover out-of-pocket needs (but not premiums).“If you had a check in the mail, you could buy the insurance you thought was best for you,” Oz stated, even though this is no different in theory than President Barack Obama’s insurance exchange tax credits through the 2010 Affordable Care Act.Similarly, when Trump disrupted federal funding for Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) program — which aids childcare, academic support and family resources in low-income students — it disproportionately harmed parents in rural counties, even though those counties broke roughly 93 percent for Trump in the 2024 election.
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