Former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer is a permanent resident of the spin zone.
Years removed from his stint as the obsequious mouthpiece for Donald Trump’s White House in 2017, Spicer remains committed to sycophantic praise and misinformation benefiting his former boss.
His latest gig? Deceiving older folks, evidently.
Spicer is the senior (no pun intended) adviser at a new pro-Trump political organization called Seniors Matter for America. The group seems committed to dressing up the president’s record when it comes to older voters, a demographic Trump and the GOP has relied on heavily in elections but which, according to polling data, has shown growing signs of revulsion toward the president.
Spicer’s group debuted an ad this week that is essentially the same as one of those deceptive chain emails. The video’s narrator says Trump has “puts America’s seniors first,” touting him for having “fought for no taxes on Social Security,” and claiming he’s doing things like “lowering healthcare costs,” “making prescription drugs more affordable” and “ensuring Medicare Advantage is strong and reliable.”
Every one of these claims is questionable if not demonstrably false.
The administration’s boasts about taxes on Social Security have been debunked, and some tax policy experts have raised concerns that the Social Security changes that Republicans did enact last year will accelerate the insolvency of the program.
As for the claim about the president “lowering healthcare costs,” the deep Medicaid cuts in the budget that Trump and Republicans forced through last year could jeopardize the quality of nursing home care for more than a million people. And the budget’s deep cuts for rural hospitals certainly doesn’t seem ideal for those patients.
The ad’s claims about cheaper prescription drugs and strengthened Medicare Advantage are also quite questionable, to put it mildly.
There’s also the fact that Republicans’ cuts to federal food assistance have left many older people at risk of going hungry. And as journalist Paul Waldman recently wrote for MS NOW, Trump has pardoned fraudsters who pocketed millions of dollars while running nursing homes, all while his administration withholds crucial aid from blue states in the name of purported fraud.
None of this points to an administration that can credibly be seen as a friend to the older population. And increasingly, it seems the only member of the demographic Trump truly cares about is himself — if his golden statue, self-aggrandizing Jesus comparison and persistent desire to plaster his name and face all over buildings and official documentation are any indication.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.