Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump gestures to supporters as he hosts a campaign rally at the Forum River Center in Rome, Georgia, U.S. March 9, 2024.
Alyssa Pointer | Reuters
President Joe Biden on Monday quickly slapped down Donald Trump’s suggestion in a CNBC interview that “there is a lot” that can be done in terms of cutting the government programs Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
“Not on my watch,” Biden said in a social media post on X in response to a video of Trump’s comment that was posted by his reelection campaign.
It was the latest quick response by Biden and his campaign to something said by the former president, who as the presumptive Republican nominee is on track to face Biden in November in a rematch of the 2020 election.
The White House also issued a statement calling the idea of cutting Social Security and Medicaid “exactly backwards.”
Trump was asked Monday by CNBC’s Joe Kernen on “Squawk Box” if he had changed his “outlook on how to handle entitlements: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”
Trump replied, “So first of all, 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. There is tremendous amounts of things, and numbers of things, you can do,” Trump said.
Trump took issue with Kernen’s suggestion that there is at least the perception that there was not much difference between how he views the idea of cutting entitlement spending and how Biden views it.
“I don’t necessarily agree with the statement,” Trump said.
“I know that they’re going to end up weakening Social Security because the country is weak,” he added, referring to the Biden administration.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates later issued a statement noting that Biden, in his State of the Union address to Congress last week, had warned that “Republican officials plan to cut Medicare and Social…
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