‘Not just for Blacks in the ghetto’: GOP operative concerned about Elon Musk Medicaid cuts
White House staff are reportedly furious with Elon Musk.
Tara Palmeri, most recently from Puck and Politico, wrote for her Substack “The Red Letter,” that President Donald Trump’s team is dealing with fallout from Musk’s interview with Larry Kudlow on Fox News in which he talked about Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
The issues are generally known as the “third rail” of politics, a reference to subway lines which have an electric rail that when touched can electrocute and kill you. Those issues become “untouchable.”
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“Even though Trump’s staffers are terrified of Musk, they know that if you try to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, you die, politically speaking,” wrote Palmeri.
White House aides told her that they never wanted Musk to do the interview. Talking about entitlements on a network with a viewership demographic that skews older could become a problem for them.
Palmeri cited one GOP operative “close to the White House” who explained, “Medicaid is not just for Black people in the ghetto, these are our voters.”
“It’s no longer simmering resistance, people are f——- furious,” a source with knowledge of the situation told Palmeri.
When he came into office, President Donald Trump created the “Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)” by executive order, and handed it over to Musk. That initiative has been behind the upheaval and dismantling of government agencies. Websites, grants, programs, and employees have been cut or frozen under the promise that Trump will save taxpayers trillions.
Musk’s comments to Kudlow made it sound as if he was saying entitlement spending is “the big one to eliminate.” The White House published a fact-check memo blaming the media for getting Musk’s comments wrong, saying he was specifically talking about the waste and fraud in entitlement spending.
“The waste and fraud in entitlement spending — which is most of the federal spending is entitlements — so, that’s, like, the big one to eliminate. That’s the, sort of half-trillion, maybe $6-700 billion a year,” said Musk.
The problem with the White House clean-up, Palmeri wrote, is that “Musk went further, falsely claiming in the interview that Democrats use entitlement programs to attract illegal immigrants into the country so that they can add them to their voter rolls.”
She noted that the comments come after Musk called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”
Read her full column right here.