Talking about former President Donald Trump recently, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — his 2016 election opponent — warned about Trump’s threats using the old adage “when someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time.”
[Clinton’s Trump warnings included: “Take him at his word. The man means to throw people in jail who disagree with him.”]
The Biden-Harris campaign is using social media to amplify the most harrowing of Trump’s promises, sharing repeated examples of Trump revealing who he is and what he means to do if re-elected. The Biden team is counting on voters, not including the unshakeable MAGA base, finding Trump’s tells and promises alarming.
So Biden’s team is highlighting a Trump threat to “terminate” so-called Obamacare, saying “we should never give up.”
Trump calls to “terminate” health care for millions of Americans and allow people to be denied coverage for having preexisting conditions pic.twitter.com/4M4XG2qfZl
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) November 27, 2023
Biden evidently believes the health care threat — more than the abstract “threat to democracy” Trump reportedly poses — will hit voters harder, since while a majority of citizens want government to spend less and do less, the same people support no reductions in health care assistance provided in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). By some accounts the ACA program’s favorability reached 62% in March 2023.
Going after Obamacare is not new to Trump — in 2020 Brookings published an article entitled “Six ways Trump sabotaged the Affordable Care Act.”
But if the data is correct that more people now view the program favorably, Biden’s team — as embodied by Biden-Harris HQ on X — is betting that this Trump threat, far more than his cries against a “woke” society, will help Biden in a close race.
