MAGA’s Closing Pitch to Voters: Economic Pain and Health Care Sorcery
MAGA’s Closing Pitch to Voters: Economic Pain and Health Care Sorcery
With days to go, top Trump surrogates are laying out a presidency that they admit will include some suffering.
ERASE EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT this presidential campaign from your memory and image this.
In the closing days of the election, one party and its leading candidate are promising to inflict economic pain on the electorate; stating that they will turn over the top health agencies to one of the country’s leading vaccine skeptics; and pledging to pursue a disruptive, “massive reform” to the nation’s healthcare system—historically, the sort of move that has proven extremely unpopular.
In such a scenario, one might wonder what that party was thinking and why they felt this was the strongest foot to put forward to voters. And yet this is precisely what’s taking place.
After spending a whole cycle trying hard to keep his policy message to broad, inoffensive, primary-color strokes, Donald Trump’s campaign and his surrogates have inexplicably decided that this is the week for some real talk.
Elon Musk, Trump’s richest and loudest backer and his “secretary of cost-cutting”-to-be, has repeatedly suggested that the opening act of a second Trump presidency could be a period of serious economic turbulence. On a call last Friday, he warned that “some temporary hardship” would be necessary to put America back on a sustainable fiscal course. And on Monday, he replied to an X account predicting “markets would tumble” thanks to an “initial severe overreaction in the economy” if Trump followed through on his mass-deportations strategy, before ultimately resulting in “a healthier, sustainable economy.”
“Sounds about right,” Musk replied.
Last night, antivax crank Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a man who once said Covid was possibly a bioweapon that had been “deliberately targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews—told a group of supporters on a video call obtained by CNN that Trump had promised him “control” over America’s public health agencies:
The key that I think I’m—you know, that President Trump has promised me—is control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH and a few others—and then also the USDA, which, you know, is key to making America healthy. Because we’ve got to get off seed oils, and we’ve got to get off of pesticide-intensive agriculture.
And then there was Speaker Mike Johnson, who was recently taped waxing eloquent about how Trump, who tried and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act during his first term, was planning to “go big” on health care policy if reelected.
“No Obamacare?” a listener asked. “No Obamacare,” the speaker replied. “The ACA is so deeply engrained, we need a massive reform to make this work. And we’ve got a lot of ideas on how to do that.”
Collectively, the proclamations have put Trump’s campaign on a policy defensive, after waging a years-long effort to center its election bid on a few fundamentals: No tax on tips, Social Security, or overtime pay; drill, baby, drill; and the magic of tariffs to create the greatest economy in the history of the world.
Whether this will matter in an election with just days left is anyone’s guess. Voter opinions seem hardened. But the Harris campaign has been quick to make use of the bevy of gifts handed to them. The vice president’s team has spotlighted Musk’s remarks several times in recent days. And it circulated a statement on Tuesday proclaiming that “Mike Johnson promises ‘No Obamacare’ if Trump wins in November.”
Speaker Johnson objected, pointing out in a Wednesday statement to The Bulwark that “No Obamacare” could equally be taken to mean that Republicans were planning not to touch the 2014 law:
Despite the dishonest characterizations from the Harris campaign, the audio and transcript make clear that I offered no such promise to end Obamacare, and in fact acknowledged that the policy is ‘deeply ingrained’ in our health care system. Still, House Republicans will always seek to reduce the costs and improve the quality and availability of health care for all Americans.
Team Trump, too, scrambled to make clear Tuesday night that he was absolutely not promising Obamacare repeal this time around: “This is not President Trump’s policy position,” campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told the Washington Post. What Trump intended, she went on, was simply “increasing transparency, promoting choice and competition, and expanding access to new affordable healthcare and insurance options.”
The back-and-forth provides perhaps the last true test of whether Trump can win the White House again on a “vague is best” policy strategy, or whether Harris can pin him to some of the Republican party’s more unpopular positions.
On a few signature issues, Trump is promising big swings: firings of federal bureaucrats, mass deportations. On other key areas, he’s been smoke on the wind. During his single debate against Harris, Trump opted to look unprepared and foolish rather than voice aloud a single health-care policy thought, opting only to say that “If we come up with something, and we are working on things, we’re gonna do it, and we’re gonna replace [Obamacare].” He went on to say that, while he might not yet have a plan, “I have concepts of a plan.”
This has been by design. At this summer’s Republican convention, Trump’s team hustled though a dramatically pared-down party platform, part of an effort to minimize the party’s exposure to specific policy attacks. This impulse was also the cause of Trump’s beef with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025: Why are these jokers trying to associate me with all these wildly unpopular positions ahead of the election?
“I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump said of Project 2025 this summer. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying, and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
The issue where this trend has been most apparent, of course, has been abortion, with Trump repeatedly opting to speak in generalities rather than discuss his opinions on various state bans or the possibility that a national ban could reach his desk.
Of course, this strategy only works when the whole squad is on the same page. It becomes far harder to execute when the surrogates forget to focus only on the winning issues, or even the Trump-approved dynamos—like retribution against his political enemies, spurious allegations of pervasive election fraud, and mass deportations.
A picture is worth a thousand words…
Or in the case of the Elon pic maybe a gallon of puke
If only there was a media pressure campaign to force him to talk to non Fox or Fox lite media outlets -- or maybe the NYTimes whine about how he won't sit for an interview.
He can say all he wants about Proj 25 but he owns that plan; it's a GOP POTUS Admin plan, if Haley would have gotten this far, it was her plan too.