Republicans Are Already Coming for Medicare and Social Security

Donald Trump’s election has Republicans chomping at the bit at some of their favorite targets: government programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

In an interview with Fox Business Tuesday morning, Representative Richard McCormick complained that “75 percent of the budget is nondiscretionary” and outlined GOP plans to tackle it.

“We’re gonna have to have some hard decisions. We’re gotta bring the Democrats in and talk about Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare,” McCormick said. “There’s hundreds of billions of dollars to be saved and we know how to do it. We just have to have the stomach to actually take those challenges on.”

McCormick’s words are not surprising. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump floated the idea of cutting Social Security and Medicare, saying in March that there is “a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting, and in terms of also—the theft and the bad management of entitlements.”

Cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security was also floated earlier this year by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who promised to cut the programs in favor of boosting the country’s military spending. And the infamous conservative manifesto Project 2025, which Trump and the GOP tried to distance themselves from until Trump’s election victory, also includes drastic cuts to the popular programs.

While McCormick pledges to talk to the Democrats about such cuts, the GOP is unlikely to get much traction with the opposing party, especially since Republicans will have a razor-thin majority in the House where a single vote or two could tank their legislative agenda.

Even if the GOP manages to win over a couple of Democrats, any plans to cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid will get pushback from powerful organizations such as the AARP. Older voters who rely on the programs also make up the base of the Republican Party, and politicians from both parties should be wary of provoking them.

If you turn on Fox News, you won’t see or hear much about Pete Hegseth, the longtime Fox anchor turned Trump nominee to lead the Department of Defense.

While Hegseth has been publicly excoriated this month for allegations of rape, sexual harassment, and misconduct and repeated drunkenness on the job, his former employer is trying its best to look the other way.

CNN analyst Brian Stelter reported that the conservative media hegemon that employed Hegseth for more than 10 years has yet to discuss the multiple allegations that its former employee is embroiled in, according to SnapStream and TVEyes database searches.

“What’s a media outlet supposed to do when its longtime host is picked to run the Pentagon, and then a series of eyebrow-raising news stories trigger doubts about his appointment?” Stelter inquired on X. “If you’re Fox News, evidently, you just pretend the stories don’t exist.”

Stelter went on to note that there were multiple moments on Fox News programming in which Hegseth’s allegations were raised but then quickly objected to or moved on from.

“On Monday’s edition of Special Report, Chad Pergram said Hegseth’s confirmation ‘could be a problem’ because ‘he faces problems about his personal conduct.’ What problems? Pergram didn’t say. Neither has anyone else on Fox,” Stelter said.

This lack of coverage is a blatant attempt at damage control from one of the most biased media conglomerates we have. Hegseth’s team has described the allegations as “outlandish.” Their impact on his nomination remains to be seen.

Many of Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees are so underqualified for their positions that authoritarianism scholars have called them “anti-qualified.” But what they lack in relevant experience is substituted by something that Trump values far more: fealty.

With dozens of nominees lined up to lead different agencies, extreme loyalty stands as the one common denominator between whose careers live and die under the MAGA leader’s second term.

Among them stand five billionaires, including Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, both of whom Trump has tapped to lead something he calls the Department of Government Efficiency. Trump’s choice for treasury secretary, hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, was also one of his major campaign donors.

Thirteen individuals who have a future in the next Trump White House made cameos at Trump’s criminal trials earlier this year, including Sebastian Gorka for counterterrorism chief, Kash Patel for FBI director, Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff, Dan Scavino as senior adviser, and Vice President-elect JD Vance.

Another dozen have been hosts on Fox News or were regular contributors to Trump’s favorite network. They include ex–Fox anchor (and accused rapist) Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel, Keith Kellogg to serve as Ukraine-Russia envoy, Representative Michael Waltz as national security adviser, and Sean Duffy for transportation secretary.

And, of course, several nominees are directly tied to Project 2025, which Trump briefly tried to distance himself from during his campaign after the details of the Christian nationalist agenda proved incredibly unpopular with the American public. They include Russell T. Vought for White House budget director, Karoline Leavitt as White House press secretary, Michigan GOP chairman Pete Hoekstra to serve as U.S. ambassador to Canada, former ICE official Tom Homan to serve as border czar, and Brendan Carr—who has warned TV networks that they would face consequences for political bias—to lead the Federal Communications Commission.

Trump’s transition team had previously promised that loyalty would be the singular criterion. In October, transition team co-chair Howard Lutnick said that no quality would be more important for incoming staffers than total allegiance to the chief Republican.

While explaining how Trump’s last administration buckled under the weight of staff turnover due to disagreements in “vision,” Lutnick said that the new agenda is to eradicate any internal hostility to the Republican’s plans.

“They’re all going to be on the same side, and they’re all going to understand the policies, and we’re going to give people the role based on their capacity—and their fidelity and loyalty to the policy, as well as to the man,” the Wall Street billionaire said at the time.

The government efficiency czars Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy seem to be mulling over a monumental change: eliminating daylight savings time.

If anyone was worried that Musk and Ramaswamy would move unilaterally as unelected bureaucrats making sweeping decisions on behalf of the electorate, you can calm your fears: Apparently they’re seeding ideas from polls on X.

“Looks like the people want to abolish the annoying time changes!” Musk posted on X last week, in response to a poll by X user James Stephenson that found nearly 82 percent of fewer than 38,000 X users would “abolish” the system of changing the clocks forward in the spring and backward in the fall.

Isn’t that what democracy is all about? Acquiescing to the requests of “X users” who are most likely bots? Having a guy who runs a social media service make decisions for the country based on the popular opinion artificially generated by his own website? That kind of thing just makes you feel so patriotic.

“It’s inefficient & easy to change,” Ramaswamy replied in a separate post.

It’s not clear that the two have seriously considered ending the practice of changing the clocks, but Musk reiterated his intention to “end the semi-annual time changes” in a follow-up post on X.

The U.S. already tried to permanently change to daylight savings time in 1974—a briefly popular decision to manage fuel consumption that ended in disaster as reports rolled in of children being killed by cars as they waited to be picked up by school buses in the dark.

While nearly 80 percent of Americans support changing the current system, according to a 2022 CBS/YouGov poll, they were less decisive about which way to move the clock. Forty-six percent wanted to shift an hour of daylight to the evening, while 33 percent preferred sticking to standard time.

It’s unclear whether Musk would advocate moving to daylight savings time or standard time, but either way would require massive infrastructure projects, which the penny-pinching DOGE-ists aren’t likely to fund. Unless, maybe, an X poll told them to.

Pete Hegseth’s church is just as bigoted and extremist as he is.

The latest scandal facing President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for the Defense Department—who has already been accused of sexual assault, predatory workplace behavior, and showing up to work drunk—revolves around the church that the warmongering, Christian nationalist belongs to.

Salon reports that Hegseth made a dramatic, spiritual about-face after his 2017 rape allegation, as faith conveniently became “real” to him during that time. He moved to Tennessee and saddled up with Christ Church and the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches and sent his children to its affiliated schools, the Association of Classical Christian Schools, or ACCS. This group is led by pastor Doug Wilson, an unordained minister who preaches right-wing extremism from the pulpit.

Wilson believes men have a sexual right to women, and has written that unsubmissive women are at fault for sexual violence committed against them. “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party … a man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” Wilson also believes that God created women “to make the sandwiches” and thinks that giving women the right to vote led to “a long, sustained war on the family.”

“Wilson holds the most extreme views of women’s submission found in any form of Christianity,” Julie Ingersoll, a religious studies professor at the University of North Florida, told Salon. “Women are taught that submission to their husbands (and other male authorities) is submission to God. Independence of any kind is cast as sin.”

Hegseth isn’t just an Easter-Christmas member of Wilson’s church: He’s a staunch public advocate. He posted in support of its schools, commended Wilson for not masking during the pandemic, and went on the ACCS affiliated CrossPolitic podcast shortly after his nomination for Defense Secretary. It makes sense that a man with multiple allegations of mistreating women would feel right at home in Doug Wilson’s Christ Church. And if confirmed, Hegseth will be sure not to leave a single degree of separation between his fanatical church and our state.

Justin Sun, a Chinese national accused of fraud, sent Donald Trump $18 million last week.

The newsletter Popular Information reports that Sun, most recently famous for spending $6.2 million on a banana and then eating it, paid $30 million for cryptocurrency tokens from World Liberty Financial, which is backed by Trump. In a pinned post on his X profile, Sun bragged about the purchase, saying his own blockchain start-up, TRON, was “committed to making America great again and leading innovation.”

Until Sun’s purchase, Trump’s crypto start-up appeared headed for failure with only $22 million in tokens sold, far short of its goal of $300 million in sales. The purchase not only keeps the WLF going, but also guarantees a windfall for Trump. A filing from the venture in October states that “$30 million of initial net protocol revenues” will be “held in a reserve … to cover operating expenses, indemnities, and obligations.”

After that reserve is met, a company owned by Trump is then entitled to 75 percent of WLF’s revenues from the sale of all other tokens. As of Sunday, WLF has sold $24 million in tokens, giving Trump a solid $18 million payoff. Sun’s purchase has also gotten him an advisory position in Trump’s venture, making him business partners with the president-elect.

And influence with Trump may be the only benefit to Sun’s transaction. Right now, Sun’s tokens don’t have any monetary value unless they “are unlocked through protocol governance procedures in a fashion that does not contravene applicable law.” Plus, Sun is also under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for fraud.

In March 2023, the SEC charged Sun, as well as three of his companies, for marketing unregistered securities and “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a cryptocurrency token “through extensive wash trading.” Wash trading is “the simultaneous or near-simultaneous purchase and sale of a security to make it appear actively traded without an actual change in beneficial ownership,” according to Popular Information.

Sun was also charged with “orchestrating a scheme to pay celebrities to tout” cryptocurrency “without disclosing their compensation.” Under federal law, people who endorse securities have to disclose their compensation as well as how much money they received. Sun apparently got Jake Paul, Soulja Boy, and Lindsey Lohan to endorse his crypto tokens.

The charges against Sun took place under the current SEC chair, Gary Gensler, who will be gone after Trump is sworn in next year. Trump’s new SEC chair, whoever that may be, could easily make those charges disappear. Trump stands to rake in much more money from cryptocurrency, and the industry spent a whopping $180 million on political campaigns during the 2024 election cycle. The president-elect is almost certain to help the crypto industry, his new benefactor Sun, and himself make more money in his second term as president.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has advocated to remove all fluoride from public water within the first month of Donald Trump’s presidency, once sold bottled water flush with the very stuff he imagines is toxic.

Kennedy, whom Trump nominated to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, claims that fluoride is “an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease.”

In fact, fluoridation helps prevent teeth from rotting out of our heads and children from getting deadly infections in their mouths. It’s been lauded as one of the 10 great public health achievements of the twentieth century by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—which Kennedy will soon oversee! (Can probably expect that statement to disappear from its website soon.)

For as much as Kennedy seems to fear the effects of fluoridated water, he seemed to have no qualms about bottling and selling it for years, according to a story published Monday by The New Yorker.

In 1999, Kennedy co-founded Keeper Springs bottled water to help fund his Waterkeeper Alliance—a strangely hypocritical venture, as his plastic-packaged product was meant to aid the preservation of public clean water.

In any case, Keeper Springs bottled water contained up to 1.3 milligrams of fluoride per liter, according to a 2009 chemical analysis. That’s a significantly higher concentration of the mineral than what’s found in most tap water—for example, New York City’s tap water contains only 0.2 milligrams of fluoride per liter. Keeper Springs stopped production in 2013.

Chris Bartle, a Keeper Springs co-founder, told The New Yorker that Kennedy wasn’t always the fluoride skeptic he is now, and that he’d “never heard it mentioned.” Bartle said that the fact that there was so much fluoride in their bottled water was “hilarious.”

Texas Senator Ted Cruz had a crude image in mind while thinking about Morning Joe anchors Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who—after spending years accusing Donald Trump of being a fascist and comparing him to Hitler—jointly travelled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with the president-elect last month.

During a discussion on Fox News Monday night about the MSNBC duo’s trip, Cruz joked that their stunning reversal was less akin to bending the knee than it was to a full-blown sexual favor.

“You have Joe and Mika go to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and suck up to Donald Trump, you can’t make that story up,” said Fox’s Sean Hannity.

“Well, I’m not even sure they were kissing the ring. I think they were kissing a little bit lower than that,” Cruz tossed back.

Scarborough and Brzezinski’s decision to visit Trump has drawn widespread condemnation, including from their core audience. Viewership for their show plummeted by 12 percent after the pair revealed on air that they had made the trek to Trump’s Florida estate, according to Nielsen. The MSNBC journalists cited a growing national disinterest with Trump’s misconduct—including election denialism and January 6—as the reason to “do something different” and meet with the MAGA leader. Trump, for his part, said the meeting went well.

But even on-air analysts at the network couldn’t hold their tongue on the issue. Former lawmaker and MSNBC analyst David Jolly slammed the pair on Tuesday, torching them for wavering on their values now that Trump is set to imminently return to the White House.

“We didn’t wake up after the election and think, I’m upset because I was wrong. We’re upset because we know we’re right, but we’re on the losing side of this battle. And so what does that mean for a responsible media, for a responsible electorate, for a responsible Democratic Party in this environment?” Jolly said. “Don’t just say we’re going to give equity to Donald Trump, which some people are doing in the Democratic Party, in media, among the electorate.”

Cruz is, however, possibly the last person who should be making jokes about spineless behavior. The unpopular Texan has backtracked several times on his own criticisms of Trump, enthusiastically endorsing him even after Trump called Cruz’s wife ugly and mocked his height on the national stage, claiming to millions of Americans that Cruz needed heels in order to reach the podium.

Donald Trump responded to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s warning that both Canadians and Americans might seriously suffer from the president-elect’s tariffs with respect and seriousness—just kidding: Trump actually responded by cracking a joke.

Trudeau dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago Friday, and warned the president-elect that his plan to impose a 25 percent tariff on goods imported into the United States from Canada would be disastrous for both countries, echoing similar warnings from economists.

Fox News’s Peter Doocy reported Monday that destroying global economies is just one big joke to Trump.

“When Trudeau told President-elect Trump that new tariffs would ‘kill’ the Canadian economy, Trump joked to him that if Canada can’t survive without ripping off the U.S. to the tune of $100 billion a year, then maybe Canada should become the fifty-first state and Trudeau should become its governor,” Doocy said.

Sources told Fox News that when someone at the table reminded Trump that Canada would be a liberal state, the president-elect conceded that Canada could be split into two states: a liberal one and a conservative one.

Trudeau had traveled to Mar-a-Lago in the hopes of getting Trump to back off his tariff plan for Canada by reminding the president-elect that the U.S. border with Canada is very different from its one with Mexico. Such sentiments didn’t please Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who responded by insisting that Mexico “must be respected, especially by its trading partners.”

If implemented, Trump’s plan to impose 25 percent tariffs on all goods from Mexico and Canada would result in an estimated loss of $250.6 billion in annual U.S. gross domestic product and approximately 1.97 million jobs, according to Ray Perryman, the CEO of the financial analysis firm the Perryman Group. The tariffs would also disproportionately affect border states with more integrated economies—such as Texas.

Donald Trump’s choice to run the FBI, Kash Patel, has already put together a list of “deep state” officials whom he thinks need to be targeted.

In his 2023 book Government Gangsters, Patel calls out a long list of villains, which he calls “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State,” in an appendix. These villains are not restricted to Democrats or  even Biden administration officials, and in fact include several Republicans as well as Trump appointees, like Bill Barr, Rod Rosenstein, Pat Cipollone, Patrick Philbin, and special counsel Robert Hur.

Not surprisingly, Patel also includes FBI Director Christopher Wray, whom Trump wants him to replace, as well as Democrats ranging from White House adviser John Podesta to Vice President Kamala Harris. It seems to back up assertions that the choice of Patel is part of clear “authoritarian takeover,” in the words of The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols.

An FBI director having an enemies list undermines the law enforcement purpose of the position, but is exactly what Trump is looking for, since he has repeatedly stated his desire to take revenge for the grievances of his first term. Trump’s team, however, is already souring on Patel—maybe because they don’t want to end up in the enemies list of his next book.

If Trump goes ahead with nominating Patel, this latest revelation will not help his confirmation hearings, especially considering that Republicans and Democrats support Wray staying on. FBI directors are supposed to serve a single 10-year term, but Patel’s appointment would make him the third FBI director in seven years thanks to Trump, who fired James Comey in 2017 after only four years in the post.

Patel’s job at the FBI will basically be to act as Trump’s hatchet man and upend the rule of law. The underqualified MAGA loyalist has only three years working in the Department of Justice as his law enforcement experience, and is likely to butt heads with more experienced law enforcement officers. If Patel gets past the Senate, will he face resistance or cooperation from the rank-and-file FBI?