For too long, Donald Trump has enjoyed the presumption among media and political elites that he’s fundamentally different from the Republican Party on the economy. This partly reflects what I’ve called “2016 brain,” which treats that year as the only important touchstone for interpreting our politics, to the near-total exclusion of everything that has happened since.

In 2016 Trump did differentiate himself by vowing to preserve the safety net, particularly for the elderly. Yet even though he largely outsourced his agenda as president to then-Speaker Paul Ryan and the plutocrats, who threatened all kinds of deep cuts to social programs, pundits still sometimes view him through that misleading 2016 prism.

That’s why Trump’s latest rant over Social Security and Medicare—in which he vowed never to touch those programs and absurdly blamed immigrants for threatening them—is such a key tell. Having succeeded at pulling off a massive deception on these topics once before, he fully knows both how fragile that illusion is and why shattering it is so dangerous to his 2024 hopes.

Trump posted this Thursday night on Truth Social:

Unlike the Democrats, who are KILLING SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE by allowing the INVASION OF THE MIGRANTS, I will NOT, under any circumstance, allow either of these two precious GEMS to be even touched under a Trump Administration. Biden is killing them both with the INVASION, while at the same time destroying our Country!

Plainly, what triggered this rage-rant was the news that a group of House Republicans has proposed a budget that would raise the retirement age for Social Security........

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