During the first weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term, Representative Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat who for many years co-chaired the Congressional Progressive Caucus, decided to hold “ask-me-any-question” town hall meetings in Republican-leaning areas. At these meetings, in rural areas of Pocan’s own district and in the neighboring district of a rightwing Republican colleague, he expected to hear a wide-ranging array of views on the chaos unleashed by the forty-seventh President. But, very early on, a pattern emerged. When Pocan asked a packed session in Belmont, Wisconsin—population: 989—what people wanted to talk about, the answers were loud, clear, and specific:
“Medicaid.”
“Medicare.”
“Social Security.”
It was the same a few weeks later in Viroqua, Wisconsin—population: 4,500. Speaker after speaker offered poignant testimony on their fear that elderly relatives would be denied their full benefits under Social Security, that children with disabilities might be cut off, that lifesaving health care support might become inaccessible. Those weren’t the only issues that constituents in counties that voted for Trump in November 2024 were bringing up in February and March 2025 but, says Pocan, “Issues with Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security kept coming up. People were worried about cuts, about systems that were breaking down because federal workers were being laid off, about the threat of privatization. There was a lot of anxiety, and understandably so.”
The “move-fast-and-break-things” approach to governing that has defined the first months of Trump’s second term has been so reckless, so lawless, and so genuinely threatening to the fabric of society—not to mention democracy—that members of Congress, reporters, and activists find themselves whipsawed between crises. The list of legitimate subjects of concern seems very nearly endless. There is the stock market turbulence associated with tariffs and trade wars. Profound fears about the future of civil liberties have been raised by the lawless kidnappings of immigrant students and workers by masked federal agents. The agency-upending schemes of billionaire “special government employee” Elon Musk, which have laid off thousands of essential workers, have made it virtually impossible to get through to government helplines—raising the prospect that long-established programs and departments, which deal with everything from international aid to education, might simply disappear.
These assaults on basic understandings of what the federal government can and should do will be significant issues in the off-year elections of 2025 that will determine how key states respond to Trump and Trumpism, and in the 2026 midterm elections that could stop the increasingly erratic President in his tracks. But there is growing evidence that—as has often been the case over the ninety years since Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched Social Security, and the sixty years since Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed the legislation that effectively established Medicare and Medicaid—the greatest prospect for a political realignment comes from rising anxiety over the threat that a Republican President and his administration and his Congressional allies could destroy an already threadbare social safety net.
The fears resonate so deeply because they are grounded in reality—as opposed to traditional political posturing. Republicans have a long record of seeking to raise retirement-age requirements, reduce benefits, and privatize programs. Trump and his billionaire cronies really have been pushing for massive federal tax cuts—as much as $4.5 trillion—that Republicans have proposed to pay for with deep cuts to Medicaid. And the Republicans have refused to even entertain fiscally sound initiatives—including strategies for making upper-income Americans pay their fair share—that would preserve Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security over the long term.
Anxiety over threats to programs that for tens of millions of Americans provide critical support has moved preserving Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid toward the top of the list of issues for voters. In an early March Gallup poll, 52 percent of those surveyed said they worried “a great deal” that harm might be done to Social Security.
A January Navigator Research study found: “Four in five Americans oppose cuts to Medicaid and Medicare (81 percent) in order to pay for the Republican tax plan, including 87 percent of Democrats, 76 percent of Republicans, and 77 percent of independents.”
In a rational politics, that would settle the issue. Obviously, there is very little that is rational about the politics of the Trump Administration and its Congressional allies. But could voters impose rationality in special elections this year for U.S. House seats, and next year for the whole of the House? And in state contests like the off-year gubernatorial and legislative contests in New Jersey and Virginia?
The Navigator Research report noted that, “When presented with a list of proposed policies that go along with the Republican tax plan, a majority of Americans are most concerned that it will lead to cuts to Medicaid and Medicare (64 percent).” That creates the prospect that Republican control of the policy agenda could be upended in relatively short order.
In a desperate attempt to avert such a result, the President and House Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, claim there will be no cuts. Unfortunately for Johnson, his own language calls his commitment into doubt. “We’re not going to cut into those programs that way,” the speaker told CNN when asked about using Medicaid cuts to finance new tax breaks for the rich. “We’re talking about finding efficiencies in every program, not cutting benefits for people who rightly deserve them.” “Finding efficiencies”? “People who rightly deserve them”? These phrases, critics say, sound like wiggle words employed by Republican politicians who have historically eyed Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid accounts as pots of money to enrich the billionaire class and, through privatization schemes, to give Wall Street speculators virtually unlimited fun money.
If Johnson’s words have failed to inspire confidence, Trump’s March address to a joint session of Congress kindled open fear that Social Security is in the administration’s sights. After lavishing praise on Musk’s slash-and-burn assault on federal agencies, the President glossed over mounting concerns about the state of the economy, leading a frustrated Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to comment, “I did not hear one word from Trump tonight about the economic reality facing 60 percent of our people [who live paycheck to paycheck], or the enormous stress that they are living under.”
But Trump took a lot of time to describe the Social Security Administration—which is generally well-regarded by government watchdogs—as a cesspool of waste, fraud, and abuse. Claiming the administration had uncovered “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program,” Trump echoed disproven assertions and outright lies in a speech that suggested that millions of Americans are gaming the system.
“Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old,” Trump claimed. That was a demonstrably false claim. “The vast majority of these people do not have dates of death listed in Social Security’s database,” explained CNN’s fact-checking team. “But that doesn’t mean they are actually receiving monthly benefits. Public data from the Social Security Administration shows that about 89,000 people age ninety-nine or over were receiving Social Security benefits in December 2024, not even close to the millions Trump invoked.”
Clearly, Trump had no interest in facts. Rather, he was spinning a fantasy that might make it easier to assault the program. “Trump is spewing misinformation about Social Security so he can ultimately justify cutting your benefits,” argues Pocan, a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee. Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote on X, “Trump keeps spreading lies about Social Security. What he isn’t telling you is that he’s actively trying to dismantle it—firing thousands of SSA employees and shuttering regional offices. Why? To pave the way for privatization, so Wall Street can gamble with our retirement.”
The Progressive
On March 8, Representative Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin, held a town hall meeting in Belmont, Wisconsin, in the neighboring district of a rightwing Republican colleague.
That’s the concern of Senator Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, who already sees evidence of the assault playing out in the form of Social Security Administration office closures and staff cuts in her state. “Wisconsinites pay into Social Security over a lifetime of hard work. But instead of helping our seniors access their earned benefits, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are gutting the agency and putting up roadblocks for Wisconsinites who often rely on Social Security to pay rent, keep the heat on, and put food on the table,” Baldwin put it in an early April statement. “If you fire people at the Social Security Agency, who is going to help our seniors get their benefits? As far as I can tell, this is all about taking Social Security benefits away from seniors in our state—all so they can fund their tax breaks for big corporations.” Warning about the prospect of similarly devastating cuts to Medicaid, Baldwin launched a “Hands Off Medicaid” tour of mid-sized Wisconsin cities “to highlight the potential impact of cuts on over 1.2 million Wisconsinites who rely on the program.”
Baldwin, a progressive with a long history of defending Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, brings moral clarity to an issue she presents as a stark choice between siding with working Americans who just want what they are owed versus billionaires who not only refuse their fair share but want to redistribute wealth upward. She’s also a savvy political strategist who has never lost an election in the nation’s ultimate battleground state, and who won re-election last year even as Trump was narrowly carrying Wisconsin.
Baldwin is well aware that, if Trump keeps threatening vital programs that Americans value and rely on, Republicans are likely to be punished at the polls in the off-year elections of 2025 (a year in which they have already lost a high-stakes Wisconsin Supreme Court race, where Musk intervened with more than $25 million in spending) and the bigger-stakes elections of 2026.
How potent are these issues? On their hugely successful “Fighting Oligarchy” tour of red states and Congressional districts with vulnerable GOP House members, Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, asked the crowds that attended their mass rallies to demand that their Republican representatives reject Trump’s efforts to use Medicaid cuts to fund tax breaks for billionaires.
In mid-April, according to Sanders aide Jeremy Slevin, “Twelve Republican members of Congress, including at least four in districts Senator Sanders has targeted, [have] come out against cuts to Medicaid. That’s more than enough to sink a [budget] reconciliation bill. Organizing works!”
AOC celebrated the news at a rally in Montana. But she still added a note of caution. “On the way here, we got a very interesting piece of news . . . . Some of those Republican House members that we had visited, they just led a letter warning the Republican leadership saying, ‘We don’t know if we can vote for Medicaid cuts now’ . . . . That’s you, Montana. That’s you, Colorado. That’s you, Arizona. That’s you, California. That’s you—the people,” she told the crowd in Missoula.
“We got them on their back foot . . . . But our job is not done,” said the Democrat. “We will rally every corner of the United States of America . . . . We will not stop until they actually vote no. We’re not going to let them trick us with gestures and strongly worded letters.”
That’s wise counsel. But even if a handful of Republican dissents slow Trump and Musk and Johnson down, there are no guarantees that they will give up on the long-term Republican goals of undermining and ultimately privatizing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Pocan argues that Democrats can and must make these issues central to their message in 2026. “Given the direct threats to Medicaid and Medicare in the budget resolution passed by the House of Representatives, and the multiple cabinet officials talking about changing Social Security, everyone must expect these programs are at risk,” he says. “The Democrats have stated they want to strengthen these programs and will not cut them. The difference couldn’t be more clear.”