The Washington Post’s David Weigel describes how Republicans have changed their tune on Medicare and, for this year at least, largely abandoned the idea of entitlement reform:
“[O]ver eight years, Republicans have completely given up on the idea of cutting Social Security or Medicare to reduce the deficit. … Donald Trump changed the Republican Party in a number of ways; the most impactful was, arguably, his insistence that there was no need to change Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security. That ignored years of ideological effort, mostly in Washington, to use the issue of federal debt as a way of getting the parties on board with entitlement restructuring. And it worked; Trump won over voters who had not backed a Republican for president since the 1980s, if ever, with his strongest support coming from older voters.”
