There are a thousand election hot takes and post-mortems floating around these days and I'm sure we'll soon come to some consensus about what drove the Trump victory (now down to a whopping 1.48% margin and shrinking.) But if there's one thing we do know it's that he won both of his elections at least in part by shedding some Republican Party orthodoxy that had been bringing the GOP down for ages. He knows a third rail when he sees one.

And if there's one issue that differentiated Trump from other Republicans from the minute he came down that golden escalator it's his promise to preserve the so-called entitlement programs. He made it clear: "I'm not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I'm not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid," and it may have been the key to his success in that first campaign. By so boldly declaring those programs off limits he created an aura of post-ideological Republicanism, something that allowed people to buy into his fake persona as a self-made businessman who played by different rules to get things done.

He lied. His proposed budgets cut the programs every year he was in office. As Vox reported back in 2019:

Over the next 10 years, Trump’s 2020 budget proposal aims to spend $1.5 trillion less on Medicaid — instead allocating $1.2 trillion in a block-grant program to states — $25 billion less on Social Security, and $845 billion less on Medicare (some of that is reclassified to a different department). Their intentions are to cut benefits under Medicaid and Social Security.

Medicare was supposed to be cut as well, through a complicated mechanism that reallocated some of its funds. Obviously, Congress didn't approve those cuts so it didn't happen but it wasn't for lack of........

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