Former President Donald Trump warned Republicans not to vote for any cuts to social security or medicare as lawmakers spar over the debt ceiling.
“Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from medicare or social security to help pay for Joe Biden’s reckless spending spree, which is more reckless than anybody’s ever done or had in the history of our country,” Trump began at the start of his latest campaign video, released Friday.
He emphasized that Biden and the Democrats have “wasted trillions on left-wing lunacy” and that they have “thrown open our treasury and our borders to migrants from all over the world.”
“While we absolutely need to stop Biden’s out-of-control spending, the pain should be borne by Washington bureaucrats, not by hardworking American families and American seniors,” said the 45th president, adding that seniors have been “absolutely destroyed in the last two years.”
Last week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen penned a letter to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) predicting that the $31.3 trillion debt ceiling would be reached on January 19. On Thursday, she informed McCarthy that it had been reached. To keep the United States from defaulting on its exorbitant debt, Yellen said that she would begin to use “extraordinary measures.”
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of Calif., speaks with members of the press before attending a House Republican Steering Committee meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
“While Treasury is not currently able to provide an estimate of how long extraordinary measures will enable us to continue to pay the government’s obligations, it is unlikely that cash and extraordinary measures will be exhausted before early June,” she wrote in her January 13 letter to McCarthy.
As Breitbart News’s Ashley Oliver noted:
House Republicans have pledged, as a result of conference negotiations during their prolonged speaker race fight, to offset raising the debt ceiling with substantial federal spending cuts, while the White House has vowed not to entertain giving Republicans any such concessions.
On Friday, Trump highlighted that cuts could be made on a number of fronts, including cutting “hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars going to corrupt foreign countries,” cutting “the mass releases of illegal aliens that are depleting our social safety net and destroying our country,” ending radical gender programs in the military and nixing reckless funding on “climate change extremism.”
“Cut waste, fraud, and abuse everywhere that we can find it, and there’s plenty of it, but do not cut the benefits our seniors worked for and paid for their entire lives. Save social security, don’t destroy it,” he warned.