Mike Johnson’s plan to betray our most vulnerable

Yesterday afternoon, on a little-known Louisiana radio show, a clue was given that shows just how devious the Trump administration plans to be if they pull off a midterm victory. In a short interview, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson let us all know exactly where his priorities, and the priorities of this entire administration, truly lie when it comes to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. With Johnson even saying, “Entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and then things like Social Security. They have to be adjusted and fixed.” Letting us all know that they plan to make it harder for seniors struggling to afford to simply survive, and for disabled Americans who depend on programs like Medicaid to stay alive. They do not care about the millions of people who spent their entire lives paying into a system they were promised would be there for them when the time came.

What came through loud and clear was something very simple. They don’t care if seniors suffer. They don’t care if seniors lose the healthcare they depend on. They don’t care if elderly Americans are forced into impossible situations at the end of their lives. They only care about finding more money for Donald Trump, his donors, and the wealthy people who have spent years treating the federal government like their own personal piggy bank. The people who always seem to have enough money for tax cuts, corporate giveaways, and political favors, but somehow never enough to take care of the people who spent a lifetime building this country.

Here is what makes this moment so revealing. He did not say it under hard questioning from a reporter determined to pin him down. He did not let it slip in the heat of a press conference. He said it on the Moon Griffon Show, a conservative Louisiana radio program. It was friendly, comfortable, and exactly the kind of room where a man says what he actually believes, because he is certain only friends are listening.

And for most of that interview, Johnson sounded like a man selling the best of times. He told the host, “God is not done with America yet, brother.” He called this “the greatest nation in the history of the world,” and said we are “the most free, most successful, most powerful, most benevolent nation that’s ever been.” He bragged that “People just got their biggest tax refunds that they’ve ever gotten in their lives,” that “They’re getting bigger paychecks,” that “The stock market’s doing well,” and that the economy “is going to take off like a rocket.” Then, in that same easy conversation, somewhere between the talk of tax refunds and the fall elections, he turned to the programs that keep tens of millions of Americans alive and said they “have to be adjusted and fixed.”

Here is the fuller quote, in his own words. “Over 74 percent of federal spending is on autopilot. Mandatory spending. That’s your entitlement programs like, Medicare, Medicaid, and then things like Social Security. They have to be adjusted and fixed. We have a plan to do that, uh, next year, and it’s critical because we’re at 40 trillion, plus.” He closed that thought with one more line, that concerns me the most: “desperate times call for desperate measures.”

He called this the most benevolent nation that has ever existed. In the same breath, he announced a plan to cut into the three programs that represent the closest thing this country has ever built to a real promise to its own people. And the language he used was chosen to hide exactly that. He called it “mandatory spending” that is “on autopilot,” as though it were some runaway machine that nobody asked for. That framing is a lie of omission. Social Security is not a handout. It is funded by a dedicated payroll tax that working people pay out of every single paycheck, deposited into a trust fund that is legally separate from the rest of the budget, and by law, it cannot spend a dollar more than workers have paid into it. The hospital portion of Medicare works the same way. This is not charity. It is earned money. It is deferred wages, taxed out of people their whole working lives on a promise that it would be waiting for them when they needed it. Medicaid is built differently. It is funded out of general revenue, and it is the program that covers children, people with disabilities, working families, and the seniors in nursing homes who have nowhere else to turn. But the smear that it is a handout fails there, too, because the people it keeps alive are not freeloaders. They are the most vulnerable among us.

But maybe the most concerning part is why they are pushing so hard to take away these much-needed programs. The law they passed last year, the one Johnson bragged about in this very interview, tells the whole story of why. The Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan scorekeeper, looked at who wins and who loses under that law. Its finding was that resources go down for households at the bottom of the income scale and up for households at the top. The Medicaid cuts in that law and the tax cuts for the top 1% of earners each amount to roughly a trillion dollars. The same law raised the threshold on the estate tax so that inherited fortunes worth up to fifteen million dollars now pass without a dime of tax owed. The floor was cut out from under the people who paid in, and the ceiling was raised for the people who inherit. That is the entire design, in a single sentence. To give the tax cuts to the ultra-rich, they have to find the money elsewhere, and they have zeroed in on the money we spend on the most vulnerable Americans to make up the difference.

What is happening here is much darker than ordinary politics. These are not men who lie awake worried about a senior choosing between insulin and rent. To the people writing this plan, those seniors are not real in the way you and I are real. They are a line item. A number on the wrong side of a ledger. People who, in their eyes, consume more than they produce, who take out more than they put in, even though that is a lie, because most of these people paid in for decades. To this class of lawmaker, insulated by wealth most Americans cannot imagine, the suffering of an ordinary person does not register as suffering. It registers as savings. And here is the coldest part, the part we have to say bluntly. They do not need to actively want seniors to die. They simply need to not care if it happens. Because a senior who dies a few years early, a disabled person who cannot get the care that would have kept them alive, a sick person who gives up, every one of them frees up money. Money that does not get returned to the people. Money that flows up, to Trump, to his donors, to the men who treat the Treasury as a vault they are entitled to empty.

There is one more thing that makes this interview so damning, and it is the contrast with his own mouth. In March of 2025, on Meet the Press, Mike Johnson looked the country in the eye and said cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security were off the table, that the focus would only ever be on “waste and abuse.” That was barely over a year ago. Now he is admitting that there is a plan, and it will arrive next year.

And we can’t look away from the timing. He said next year. Not now, before voters have their say. Next year, after the midterms, after the votes are counted, after it is too late to do anything about it at the ballot box. He told us the plan, and he told us the schedule, and the schedule gives him away. They are not bringing this to us before November because they know exactly what we would do with it.

These cuts will have devastating effects on our seniors, with the cost counted in something heavier than dollars. Older Americans are already the fastest-growing group of homeless people in this country. Nearly 9 in 10 Americans over 65 rely on Social Security, and for most of them, it is their main source of income. Cut that income, and you are not trimming a line on a spreadsheet. You are deciding which grandmother loses her apartment. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco found that people who first become homeless after the age of 50 are about 60% percent more likely to die than those who became homeless younger. So when we talk about cutting the income that keeps frail, elderly Americans housed, we are talking, on the evidence, about shortening their lives. That is the desperate measure. Not a hard choice bravely made. A transfer of money from the people least able to survive without it to the people who least need any more of it.

And here is what breaks my heart most, because it is the cruelest part of how this works. The very people who stand to lose the most often do not believe any of this will reach them. Many of the seniors most exposed to these cuts have been told, over and over, by Trump and by Johnson both, that their benefits would never be touched. So they believe their money will be there. They believe the promise. They cannot picture the check not arriving, because it always has, and because men they trusted swore it always would. And then there is a second belief, quieter and sadder still. Some have made a kind of peace with the harm, telling themselves that it will be temporary, or that it is a sacrifice worth making for some larger good they have been sold. It is not temporary. There is no larger good. A person is not foolish for believing a promise made to them by their own government. They were betrayed by the people who made it. But the belief is exactly what the people writing this plan are counting on, because a person who cannot imagine being harmed will not move to stop the harm until it is already done.

None of this was improvised, and none of it is new. There is a strategy underneath it that is decades old, and the people who practice it know it by heart. You cut taxes first, especially for the wealthy, which drains the revenue and drives up the debt. Then you point to the debt you just created and announce that the only responsible thing left to do is cut the programs you wanted to cut all along. The crisis is not discovered. It is built. Johnson did exactly this inside the interview. He bragged about the tax cuts, and then he held up the nearly 40 trillion dollars in debt as the reason seniors and the sick must now sacrifice. We have watched versions of this before. In Pinochet’s Chile, economic shock therapy gutted the working class and concentrated wealth and power in a small elite while ordinary people were told to accept less. The pattern never really changes. Hollow out what belongs to the people, and funnel what is left toward the top. This is how Trump and his enablers are having record growth in their personal net worth.

The biggest tool we have right now is helping others see what he is doing, and that means getting out into our own communities and talking to people. Today I spent the day driving my father and my oldest daughter up to Orange County to one of my dad’s favorite computer stores. He came out shaking his head, which is not like him, and got in the car saying, “Wait till I tell you what just happened.” At the counter, a cashier in their mid-twenties had pointed out that his items had gone up in price. My dad said, “Yeah, it’s tariffs and inflation.” And the cashier replied, “Yeah, we really need to get Gavin Newsom out of here,” because she was worried he would be reelected and felt the elections were so rigged. My dad did not know where to start. Newsom is term limited and on his way out. The elections are not rigged. And the actual cause of those higher prices, the tariffs and inflation coming straight out of what Trump is doing, never even came up. The story had been turned completely upside down, the blame pinned on the wrong man while the one raising the prices walked away clean.

That is exactly how the cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security get through. Not because people want it, but because by the time it reaches them, the truth has already been buried under something easier to repeat. So the job between now and November is simple, and it is ours. When Trump says something, it is parroted everywhere within the hour. We need to be just as clear and just as relentless with the truth because it only wins if we are willing to say it as often as they say the lie. So we say it. To our parents, to our kids, to the stranger at the register. Every single time.

But here is the one thing Mike Johnson left out of his plan to come after our most vulnerable Americans. For the past year, Democrats have been overperforming in special elections, in deep red places, and even in districts Trump won by double digits. Americans are seeing right through this. And the more these men talk, the more they stand in front of a friendly microphone and tell us exactly what they intend to do to us, the more people see them for precisely who they are. That is the gift in a moment like this one. Johnson told on himself. And every time one of them does, another person wakes up.

We still have nearly five months to get ahead of this. And everything I am seeing tells me we can, from the polls, to the booing that followed Trump at the Knicks game last night, to the simple fact that the plan Johnson is bragging about does not actually exist yet. It is scheduled, not done. If we do our job between now and November, if we keep talking and keep telling the truth, he does not get to do it, because they lose the House, and maybe the Senate, too. That is what the last year has been pointing at. And that is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.

Picture of the day: One of my favorite parts of long drives is getting to do a little bird watching in different places along the way. Oddly enough, most of my favorite spots were nearly empty today. Still caught a few pelicans, so not all was lost.

Sources:

Speaker Johnson Joins the Moon Griffon Show: YouTube video

https://www.newsweek.com/mike-johnson-explains-social-security-fraud-comments-blasts-fearmongering-12047490

The Moon Griffon Show - Monday, Jun 8: https://kpel965.com/podcast/popup/?id=5f199c6f74feeb6069a8ea51&item=0&theme=light&playertype=player