Trump would gut Social Security, Medicare just as boomers need them

Demonstrators hold up signs that say "Medicare for All"

Nov. 1, 2024 12:37 PM PT

Donald Trump was already in the classroom when Brown vs. Board of Education desegregated schools in 1954. He was about 30 before women were able to obtain their own credit cards, in his 40s before a Black man led a Fortune 500 company, and in his 60s before the election of President Obama.

Opinion Columnist

LZ Granderson

LZ Granderson writes about culture, politics, sports and navigating life in America.

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Trump is among the eldest of the baby boomers, born in 1946.

By 2030, every person from his generation will officially be a senior citizen. That’s more than 70 million Americans who lived through the civil rights movement and women’s liberation and witnessed the last vestiges of Jim Crow die off. That’s also more than 70 million eligible for Medicare and Social Security.

These two data points might appear unrelated, but in their own ways they are driving Trump’s supporters: Many don’t like the changes America has seen in Trump’s lifetime and would love to turn back the clock to 1946. A handful of his wealthiest supporters, meanwhile, are more interested in ensuring that the needs of 70 million baby boomers don’t get in the way of tax cuts.

During Trump’s presidency, a bloc of conservatives was focused on “making America great again” by attacking diversity and vilifying drag queens. While his base was distracted by his constant chaos and scapegoating, Trump was busy trying to cut entitlements such as Social Security each year he was in the White House.

Now he’s back at it: Asylum seekers and migrants are a favorite bogeyman for Trump this election cycle, and his followers are in a frenzy over diversity. While he has MAGA focused on Haitians and Puerto Ricans, his sights are set on cutting the very programs that baby boomers need. Make no mistake: Under Trump, the working class and middle class would suffer again as they did during his first administration.

One of the former president’s most prominent supporters, Elon Musk, reportedly would lead a “government efficiency commission” if Trump were elected — and you can bet he would find “inefficiency” wherever the government is using tax dollars in the interests of average Americans. Acknowledging that Trumponomics would hurt most people, Musk used the phrase “temporary hardships” to describe what Americans can expect should Trump get back in the White House. And he gave the former president more than $70 million to get there.

Like Trump, Musk grew up in a segregated society — in his case, apartheid South Africa. The world’s richest man spent his formative years in a country in which white men received preferential treatment and in which white people were largely shielded from seeing how Black people were treated by the government. Like Trump, Musk despises diversity efforts. Both are prone to promote misinformation, conspiracy theories and racism.

Oh, and they both pay a much lower tax rate than the average American — the people Musk warns should brace for “temporary hardships.”

On the campaign trail, Trump is promising to eliminate taxes on overtime pay. What he doesn’t tell you is that Project 2025, the blueprint for the next Republican administration to reshape the federal government, would eliminate overtime pay. Both he and Musk are anti-union and talk lovingly about finding ways to pay employees less. Trump has a reputation for not paying contractors at all.

What exactly about this candidate screams “compassionate conservative”?

For nearly five decades that phrase, along with “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” and “Reagan Democrats,” has provided cover for white voters who want all of the tax cuts promised on the campaign trail and none of the racism those cuts are wrapped in. Charismatic boomers like Trump have long pitched policies in America under the guise that such a dynamic was possible — but it’s a thin veil, when they use rhetoric such as “welfare queens” and “they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs.” It’s no different from when white Southerners try to defend displaying the Confederate flag as “heritage not hate” while electing officials who want to ban books that paint a realistic portrait of that heritage. Inventing “welfare queens” was never just about saving tax dollars, and the Confederate flag has never been a simple symbol of anything noble.

Millennials have displaced boomers as the largest adult generation, and yet the needs of boomers are guaranteed to be among the nation’s top priorities for years to come, because they’ll be straining the social safety net.

We have got to find a way to have conversations about the future of Medicare, Social Security and other programs without charlatans like Trump and Musk mucking up policy discussions with yesteryear’s racism. It’s tiresome and counterproductive, and the stakes are too high: 70 million Americans are depending on the rest of us to get our act together.

The nation is not only getting more diverse; it’s also getting older. The solutions will not come in the form of prejudice disguised as policy. That’s the world Trump and Musk grew up in, and that’s what they’re offering more of.

@LZGranderson