The potentially calamitous fight over the debt ceiling has begun, and former President Trump weighed in emphatically on Friday with advice to his fellow Republicans. “Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security,” Trump said in a video posted to Truth Social, per the Hill. At Politico, Meredith McGraw writes that by issuing the message, "Trump places his fellow Republicans in a political corner." Some in the party have floated the controversial idea of cutting the entitlement programs, notes Axios, and Trump's warning may diminish their leverage.
Trump did, however, lay out other areas for cuts in going after President Biden, including "left-wing gender programs from our military." He added: “Cut waste, fraud and abuse everywhere that we can find it and there is plenty of it. But do not cut the benefits our seniors worked for and paid for their entire lives. Save Social Security, don’t destroy it.” (The Hill notes that the national debt increased by about $7 trillion during the Trump administration.) The White House, meanwhile, continues to insist that it will not negotiate and wants the debt ceiling lifted without conditions.
The US needs permission from Congress to borrow money to pay its bills, a move that is usually pro forma but is anything but in today's DC. Treasury chief Janet Yellen, who has begun taking steps to ward off disaster temporarily, warned again on Friday of the stakes. If the US defaults, “our borrowing costs would increase and every American would see that their borrowing costs would increase as well,” Yellen told CNN. “On top of that, a failure to make payments that are due, whether it’s the bondholders or to Social Security recipients or to our military, would undoubtedly cause a recession in the US economy and could cause a global financial crisis.” (More Donald Trump stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
