As Andrew Kaczynski reported in 2015, Trump called for letting people invest their Social Security contributions and for hiking the retirement age in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve. Trump wrote, “This is a sacrifice I think we all can make. And I don’t accept the criticism that it’s easy for guys like me to tell thirty-year-olds they shouldn’t retire until they’re seventy. Like a lot of people I know, I plan to work forever.”
These positions did not blow back on Trump during the 2016 primary or the general election. Trump’s thoroughly postmodern, protean character might be part of the reason for that — his latest provocation easily sweeps away everything that came before. But another reason is that Trump pivoted away from those positions throughout the 2016 campaign. He pledged to keep Social Security and Medicare as they were, and he mostly talked about other issues instead.
In a hypothetical 2024 campaign, nothing would stop DeSantis from making a similar pivot, especially since some of those old positions of his are from a decade ago.
[True. The only problem with that, however, is that entitlements are the biggest driver of national debt, and that problem will only grow worse as Americans get older on average. This is a recipe for successfully kicking the can down the road, when we should be looking at strategies for salvaging the current obligations and restructuring for less-invested generations. — Ed]
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