On the campaign trail, Donald Trump promised to end taxes on Social Security benefits. Many seniors naturally responded positively to this idea, and he was rewarded with their votes. It’s easy to see why many would agree with this idea on the surface. After all, workers already pay taxes on their earnings throughout their careers. These taxes are used to fund future Social Security benefits. Retirees would be excused for thinking that they’re being taxed twice.
However, the reality is far more complicated — and potentially disastrous. By law, taxes on Social Security benefits are funneled back into the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. Ending this revenue stream would have serious financial consequences, accelerating the insolvency of both programs. This would put the benefits that millions of American seniors depend on at grave risk.
The numbers tell a bleak story. A Wall Street Journal piece notes the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found that ending taxes on Social Security benefits would reduce revenue to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds by between $1.6 trillion and $1.8 trillion over the next decade. This would accelerate the insolvency of Social Security by a full year, bringing its projected bankruptcy date to 2032. Medicare would fare even worse, facing insolvency in 2030 — six years earlier than current projections.
The consequences of these changes would be dire. Without enough funding, Social Security and Medicare would face catastrophic benefit cuts, forcing millions of seniors to suffer due to reduced incomes and limited access to health care. These programs were designed as safety nets, but Trump’s proposals would rip giant holes in that fabric, leaving some of America’s most vulnerable citizens exposed.
Trump’s promise to end taxes on Social Security benefits is just one piece of a broader campaign to reduce taxes on income such as tips and overtime pay. While these ideas may seem attractive to the average taxpayer, together they threaten to explode the federal deficit. These policies ignore the critical role tax revenue plays in sustaining essential programs and ensuring their long-term viability.
The short-term appeal of these proposals must be carefully balanced against their long-term consequences. While seniors might save a small amount initially, the financial foundation of Social Security and Medicare would crumble, creating a much greater economic burden in the future. Popular promises often carry hidden costs, and in this case, the cost would be the stability of the very programs that seniors rely on.
The debate over taxing Social Security benefits raises legitimate questions about fairness in the tax code. However, solutions that undermine the solvency of critical programs are plainly reckless. Instead of proposing policies that threaten Social Security and Medicare’s future, Trump should focus on strengthening these systems to ensure they can support current and future generations.
Trump’s plan played well on the campaign trail, but its implications are clear: His promises risk dismantling the foundations of America’s social safety net. For the millions of Americans who depend on these programs, that is a gamble they cannot afford.
Cropf is a professor of political science at Saint Louis University.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.