Donald Trump's policy speech to the Detroit Economic Club stretched to nearly an hour. Yet Trump said not a word about two issues — Social Security and Medicare — that played prominent roles in speeches to the club by the last three Republicans to run for the White House: Mitt Romney, John McCain and George W. Bush.
Trump has often said that he will not cut or restructure the nation's two old-age safety net programs. "We'll ... save Social Security and Medicare without cuts," Trump said in a commercial last April.
At a GOP debate in February, Trump said, "We're not going to hurt the people who have been paying into Social Security their whole life, and then all of a sudden they're supposed to get less." He said similar things on a number of other occasions.
So when Trump took the stage in Detroit, there was a lot of talk about taxes, trade and regulation — and nothing about entitlements. Which might be a smart thing, at least politically. Romney and McCain promised entitlement reform and lost. Bush, who spoke in 2005 shortly after winning re-election, proposed Social Security reform and lost.
In addition, Romney even chose as his running mate the Republican lawmaker — Paul Ryan — most closely associated with entitlement reform, or entitlement cuts, as Democrats would call them. And here is what Romney said about entitlements in his 2012 Detroit Speech:
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05.08.2024