“Oh, we’ll be cutting.”
Those four words—spoken in response to a question about entitlements during a Fox News town hall on Thursday—are likely to haunt President Trump for the rest of his re-election campaign.
But don’t worry, Kellyanne Conway said thsi morning on Fox News, that Trump didn’t actually say what you heard him say.
Fox News host Ed Henry brought those comments, referring to them as something Trump “seems to be trying to clean up this morning,” during the White House counselor’s latest appearance on the network.
“Kellyanne, the president this morning promising he’ll protect Social Security and Medicare,” Henry said. “You were there at that town hall, he said the opposite. He said that he, in a second term, would cut Social Security and Medicare and he would cut entitlement programs. Why did he say that?”
“He didn’t say that,” Conway replied with a straight face. “You’re misquoting him, respectfully.” She went on to explain that when she brought up the reaction to the comments with Trump directly, he told her, “No, I’m talking about cutting deficits.”
Henry could have let it go at that, but instead he played the video clip of the moment, which clearly contradicts that explanation.
At the town hall, Fox host Martha MacCallum told the president, “If you don’t cut something in entitlements, you’ll never really deal with the debt.”
“Oh, we’ll be cutting,” Trump said in response. “But we’re also going to have growth like you’ve never had before.”
“So Martha MacCallum said right there, but you’re going to have cut entitlements to cut the deficit and he said, ‘We’ll be cutting,’” Henry said after the clip finished.
But don’t just take my word for it. Watch and listen to Trump himself tell everyone on Fox News that he wants to cut entitlements like Social Security and Medicare to reduce the balloning deficit. pic.twitter.com/4Is0QUDJ40
— Eugene Gu, MD (@eugenegu) March 6, 2020
And yet, in the face of video evidence, Conway maintained her spin.
“But that wasn’t what he was talking about, he wasn’t talking about cutting entitlements,” she insisted, pointing to a statement from Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham that similarly tried to clean up those comments.
She then deftly pivoted to blaming President Obama, and the show moved on to the coronavirus.
But despite Conway’s misleading protestations, Trump’s words have already become a major issue in the 2020 presidential campaign with both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders tweeting their respective vows to protect entitlements on Thursday evening.