Vice President Kamala Harris wrongly described former President Donald Trump’s policies on Social Security Thursday — saying the Republican presidential nominee “intends to cut” payments when he actually has called for “no cuts” and for the elimination of taxes on the entitlement.
“He intends to cut Social Security and Medicare,” the Democratic nominee said, making the same assertion at back-to-back rallies in Charlotte and Greensboro, NC, her first since Tuesday night’s ABC News debate against Trump in Philadelphia.
About 67 million Americans receive Social Security payments — of whom 58.6 million are retirees, 5.8 million are survivors of deceased spouses or parents and 8.5 million are disabled — making fear of cuts a potentially significant motivator for a wide swath of voters in the Nov. 5 election.
The Trump campaign’s official platform — ratified at the Republican convention in July — flouts long-standing calls from fiscal conservatives to slim the social safety net, saying the 45th president would “fight for and protect Social Security and Medicare with no cuts, including no changes to the retirement age.”
Trump’s plan to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits, which would effectively boost the value of those benefits, was not included in the party platform, but is a common campaign-trail pledge.
Harris has not stated her position on Trump’s call to eliminate taxes on Social Security payouts, though she has endorsed his separate proposal to eliminate taxes on tipped income.
“We will have no tax on Social Security and no tax on tips,” Trump said Aug. 19 at a rally in York, Pa. “So they haven’t copied Social Security yet, but they will — don’t forget [President Biden] is the one that destroyed our seniors with inflation.”
The former president criss-crossed the country last month advertising his plan to ax levies on benefits and attempting to force Harris into endorsing the idea.
Trump touted the reform at least eight times in August — according to the Factba.se repository of his public remarks — including during stops in Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, North Carolina, Montana and Florida.
“To help seniors on fixed incomes who are suffering the ravages of inflation, there will be no tax on Social Security… This has been talked about for a long time. She’ll probably announce this on Friday, too,” Trump needled Harris Aug. 14 in Asheville, NC.
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“Oh, look, they have a spy in the audience right over there,” Trump joked during that speech. “He’s spying. Let’s see. ‘Kamala, I think we should do no tax on Social Security.’”
The Harris campaign did not immediately offer comment on the veep’s claim that Trump would cut Social Security, but Democrats previously pointed to a March 11 CNBC interview in which Trump vaguely agreed with his interviewer 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, tremendous bad management of entitlements.”
Other factually disputed claims
Harris made other contested claims during her campaign appearances — including saying that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 was Trump’s “plan” for a second term.
“Donald Trump, well, he has a different plan, just Google ‘Project 2025’. It is a detailed and dangerous blueprint for what he will do if he is elected president,” Harris said.
Trump has repeatedly disavowed the package of policy ideas — including Tuesday night during the debate, saying “as she knows better than anyone, I have nothing to do with Project 2025… I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it.”
Last month in an interview with Newsmax, Trump dissed the project as the work of “a group of pretty far-right people,” though some of those associated with the effort worked beneath him during his term of office.
Harris also said at her North Carolina rallies Thursday that during Tuesday night’s debate, “Donald Trump refused to say that he would veto a national abortion ban.”
Trump said at the debate that “as far as the abortion ban, no, I’m not in favor.”
When asked by ABC moderator Linsey Davis to confirm the remarks from his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, that Trump would veto legislation with a federal ban, the former president argued such a bill would never reach his desk.
Harris also told her rally audience in Charlotte that Trump “has vowed that, if re-elected, he will be a dictator on day one, and that he will weaponize the Department of Justice against his political enemies.”
She did not use the weaponization claim at her second rally of the day.
Trump’s defenders say he made the dictator remark facetiously and have pointed out that the former president is the one who has been charged criminally by federal, state and local prosecutors.
In some instances, Trump has said that weaponization could go both ways and that in his first term he made plain his opinion that Hillary Clinton should not be prosecuted for allegedly mishandling classified documents, despite tauntingly telling her in 2016 she would be in jail if he won.
“[Biden] is not a nice man at all because he started weaponization, and weaponization is a double prong that can come back to haunt them, too. It’s a terrible thing for our country,” Trump said in his own recent visit to North Carolina.
In the same appearance, Trump said, “I could have put [Clinton] in jail… [but] I said to myself, ‘We want to bring the country together. Wouldn’t it be terrible to put the wife of the president of the United States in jail?’”
More recently, Trump wrote on social media that people who violate election laws would be fully prosecuted if he wins, including “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials.”
