Kamala Harris repeats dubious claim that Donald Trump would cut Social Security

In the 2024 presidential campaign, Democrats have repeatedly targeted former President Donald Trump as a threat to Social Security.

Vice President Kamala Harris, just over a week into her status as the presumptive Democratic nominee, repeated the line during a July 30 rally in Atlanta.

"Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare," Harris said.

For this fact-check, we will focus on Trump’s plans for Social Security. We’ll cover Harris’ claim about Medicare in another fact-check.

During his many years in the public eye, Trump has provided his critics with a rich vein of statements expressing openness to cutting Social Security. But the Harris campaign ignores most of what Trump has said during the 2024 campaign — namely, that he will not cut Social Security and Medicare.

We previously rated a similar claim by President Joe Biden — whom Harris succeeded as presumptive nominee — Mostly False. The evidence the Harris campaign provided to PolitiFact for this article was essentially the same as Biden’s campaign gave us for our earlier fact-check. It’s no more persuasive now.

The key threat to the long-term viability of Social Security, the universal income-support program for older Americans, is a shortage of workers feeding their tax dollars into the system, plus a growing number of retirement-age Americans qualifying to receive benefits.

As the baby boom generation has increasingly shifted into retirement, fewer workers are paying into the system.

Unless changes are made, such as increasing the retirement age or paring benefit levels, the trust fund that supports Social Security is poised to run out in the 2030s. If nothing is done, significant cuts would take effect.

However, cutting Social Security has long been the "third rail of politics" — touch it and you die politically — so even making smaller cuts to avoid bigger ones down the road has been controversial.

That’s why both Biden and Trump pledged in their 2024 campaigns not to cut the program.

Prior to the 2024 campaign, Trump has flirted with support for Social Security cuts.

At least two occurred during the 2020 presidential campaign: a 2020 Fox News town hall that was clipped and shared June 12 by the Biden campaign and a 2020 interview with CNBC.

And before he became president, Trump periodically opined that Social Security needed to be cut or privatized, including in a 2012 interview with CNBC; a 2004 appearance on MSNBC, and a 2000 book, "The America We Deserve," in which he called Social Security "a huge Ponzi scheme" and said he’d consider privatization.