Entitlements are a key issue for older voters.
Democrats are pouncing on President Donald Trump’s new, temporary freeze on payroll taxes as his secret plan to end Social Security and Medicare — traditional priorities for older voters that have not been central themes in this year’s presidential campaign. They hope Saturday’s executive order, coming less than three months before Election Day, will shore up their messaging that Trump is knee-capping the entitlements for seniors he had vowed to protect. Trump’s executive order would apply only to the Social Security payroll tax and not to Medicare, and lasts only through the end of the year. After that, employers would have to start paying up again unless Congress makes the deferral permanent as Trump wants — and that’s unlikely. But Democrats immediately framed his directive as a massive danger to both programs, reviving their older talking points against Trump budget proposals that would have cut entitlements. The message on Medicare springs from Trump’s press conference on Saturday when the president said if he won reelection he planned „to forgive these taxes and make permanent cuts to the payroll tax.
