“Let's say social security didn't send out their checks this month. My mother who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She'd think something got messed up, and she'll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.” Trump Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick
It’s a sign of Republican Party and the Trump/Musk administration’s extreme incompetence (and naviete) if they believe Americans will buy Howard Lutnick’s story that only fraudsters would care if our seniors miss a social security payment when a major share of seniors list their monthly social security payment as their major (and only) source of income!
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s comments thereby reveal why Republicans and Trump want to at least damage it enough that Republicans can privatize it for their Wall Street cronies.
It is an insane attempt to destroy social security in its current form, of course, and a reflection of Republicans’ efforts to dumb down its mostly red state electorate.
Even GW Bush attempted it, to no avail when the profit windfall that brokers would reap for managing it as a private pension fund was revealed ($5Billion at the time), which would come out of taxpayers’ pockets, of course.
Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman in a recent Substack column said why they are so blatant about it: the differences in education and the information media their red stater supporters have access to. Sixty three percent of Republican/Trump voters in 2024 were less than college educated.
Krugman also pictured who will be most harmed by his attempt to destroy social security. It will be our elderly and retired with a high school education or less, with 60 percent of their income comes from social security. And these are Republicans’ main red state supporters.
They tried something similar in Trump’s first term with more than 30 attempts to repeal Obamacare. It was a major reason Trump lost to Biden in 2020. It should be the main reason Republicans lose at least the House of Representatives in the upcoming 2026 midterm election.
The only real way to combat this wall of ignorance is with a better information infrastructure, or more effective propaganda machine, if we want to call it that. It will be necessary to expose the blatant ignorance Republicans have historically relied on to maintain their power in the red states and with swing voters that pay less attention to political news, polls have shown.
AOC and Bernie Sanders are having rallies in red and purple states like Arizona and Colorado talking what makes “common sense” to most American voters, and that have been effective in drawing up to 50,000 member crowds, for starters.
Trump/Musk are blindly rushing ahead with Musk’s so-called DOGE efficiency drive and Trump’s tariff wars that could cause horrendous damage to our economy, when there are much better ways to accomplish their stated goals of lowering regulations and decreasing the budget deficit and national debt.
Such haste is causing irreparable damage to lives and livelihoods; just as Musk’s failure to correct Tesla’s design flaws have killed people. There are better ways, and maybe the SCOTUS 5-4 ruling that Trump can’t indiscriminately fire federal workers without cause can begin to slow down the wholesale destruction enough to prevent a very large economic ‘fire’ and even a major recession, I said last week.
There is a lesson to be learned. The Tesla automobile’s sometimes fatal design flaws seem to be because of his lack of attention to details in his single-minded drive to invent new and better technologies, just as Trump’s pre-occupation with revenge and retribution clouds his thinking, and that of those that are tasked with carrying out his executive orders.
It's an opening that will combat the Republican Party’s nihilism, not to denigrate the less educated, but is common sense to most Americans—not tariffs that boost inflation and make enemies of our allies, or allow measles and bird flu epidemics to run their course rather than vaccinate, and bipartisan legislation that protects our borders rather than illegal deportations. The list goes on and on.
Common sense policies are something understood by all income groups and social classes that oligarchs and their enablers, the real fraudsters, don’t want Americans to know.
Harlan Green © 2025
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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