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Donald Trump’s friends are making big plans. Democrats are taking notice.

Oct 31, 2024, 6:06am EDT
politics
Elon Musk
Carlos Barria/Reuters
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The News

Donald Trump supporters are feeling confident about their chances — maybe too confident. His top allies are increasingly boasting about sweeping new initiatives in politically perilous territory in the election’s final days, even as they have a knife’s-edge race to complete before they have a chance to enact any of them.

Elon Musk is suddenly going into more detail about his planned position in a government efficiency commission for Trump, with talk of reducing annual spending by $2 trillion — a figure that would almost certainly require deep cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, even before trying to reconcile it with Trump’s multi-trillion dollar tax promises. Not only that, he’s been warning that the economy will suffer “temporary hardship” before voters see the benefits of a Trump/Musk agenda. That included a prediction that “markets will tumble” at first, he said on X, not something the Dow-obsessed Trump typically wants to hear.

Speaker Mike Johnson, meanwhile, reopened a simmering debate over the Affordable Care Act that other Republicans have been wary to discuss when he told a voter in Pennsylvania that overhauling health care would be “a big part of the agenda” next year. When the same voter followed up “No Obamacare?” Johnson replied: “No Obamacare. The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we’ve got a lot of ideas on how to do that.”

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Finally, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — a critical Trump endorsement for voters on the margins of party politics — has been boasting about a massive “promised” role in the next Trump administration. On Monday, he said in a livestream that he would have “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.”

Howard Lutnick, Trump’s transition co-chair, told CNN Wednesday night that Kennedy would not lead the HHS while echoing Kennedy’s view that vaccines cause autism after a 2.5-hour meeting with him. The alleged link between vaccines and autism has been extensively studied and never proven.

In each case, Democrats highlighted the remarks to feed existing attacks that a Trump campaign would slash social spending and empower unqualified or extreme loyalists. A DNC spokeswoman warned Trump would hand critical offices to an “anti-science conspiracy theorist” in Kennedy. The Harris campaign shared Musk’s “temporary hardship” quotes on social media, which fit into recent ads allied groups have run highlighting the billionaire’s influence on Trump. The campaign, which has attacked Trump for promising only vague “concepts of a plan” on health care, accused Johnson of revealing plans to take away health care benefits and protections for pre-existing conditions. Spokespersons for Trump and Johnson both denied to NBC News that either had committed to repealing the law.

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Benjy’s view

Trump can be undisciplined, but he’s actually often careful not to make news on policy issues when he doesn’t want to, opting instead for generalized boasts that he’ll fix problems and that they never would have occurred if he’d been president. He’s been specific about promising a variety of new tax breaks, for example, but much harder to pin down when it comes to spending cuts and health care.

But when a party is confident they might gain real power, the pressure from allies to commit to bigger plans gets stronger. There were shades of this in 2020, when Trump looked weak and progressives escalated campaigns to end the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court.

In this case, though, public polls suggest the race is a pure toss-up and the pressure is less from the base and more from the larger-than-life supporters Trump has made indispensable to his campaign. Figures like Musk and Kennedy have grand visions for change, big egos, and significant leverage — in Kennedy’s case, by delivering his voters, in Musk’s, by dedicating his fortune and social media reach to boosting Trump. It’s not easy to tell either to pipe down, even if it creates some problems in the final days.

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Notable

Whatever Kennedy wants to do if Trump wins, it’s likely he’d have to do it outside of his cabinet. Senate confirmation could be a brutal fight, Semafor’s Burgess Everett and Shelby Talcott report, even as some Trump insiders think it might be worth a try.

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