Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton encouraged seniors on Tuesday to listen to former President Trump’s remarks on Social Security after her 2016 presidential opponent seemed to open the door to entitlement cuts in a recent CNBC interview.
“Have seniors in your life? They should see this,” Clinton wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter, highlighting a Biden campaign post promoting a clip of Trump’s interview on CNBC on Monday.
In the interview, Trump was asked to respond to the perception that he holds similar views to Biden on how to handle entitlements, given his past commitments not to touch Social Security and Medicare.
“Seems like something has to be done, or else we’re going to be stuck at 120 percent of debt to GDP forever.” CNBC’s “Squawk Box” co-host Joe Kernen said.
“So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting,” Trump responded.
That's where the clip shared by the Biden campaign ends. But in the interview, Trump continued, “and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad management of entitlements.”
“There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do. So I don’t necessarily agree with the statement,” Trump continued.
Biden has been eager to highlight GOP threats to Social Security and Medicare and was quick to pounce on Trump’s remarks on the recent interview. He posted “Not on my watch” on X, in response to Trump’s comments.
“Cutting the Medicare and Social Security benefits that Americans have paid to earn their whole lives, only to make room for yet more unaffordable, trickle-down tax giveaways to the super wealthy, is exactly backwards,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement, responding to the CNBC interview.
The Trump campaign has said Trump was specifically talking about “cutting waste.”
