“I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare. We'll have to do it elsewhere. There's so many things we can do. There's so much cutting and so much waste in so many other areas, but I'll never do anything to hurt Social Security.”
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Adversarial re-check: all three cited sources are live, genuine, and say what the prior rating claimed. KEPT SIDE - FactCheck.org (Oct 2025) states flatly that 'As president, Trump has not proposed cutting Social Security or Medicare benefits,' and notes Project 2025 'said very little about Social Security ... and nothing at all about cutting it.' No benefit reduction to either program has been proposed or enacted. He also signed the November 2025 shutdown-ending funding law that erased the ~$3.4T statutory PAYGO scorecard, cancelling the Medicare sequester CRFB priced at ~$45B in the first year (FactCheck puts the full Medicare cut at '$536 billion over nine years, beginning in fiscal year 2026'). BROKEN SIDE - He championed and signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and CRFB's analysis of the 2026 Trustees Report attributes to OBBBA a 0.16% of payroll worsening of Social Security's actuarial balance 'by reducing revenue collected from the income taxation of Social Security benefits,' plus 0.09% of payroll added to Medicare's shortfall; the report states 'The Trustees now project the OASI retirement trust fund will go insolvent in 2032, compared to 2033 in last year's report.' That is a documented, self-inflicted acceleration of insolvency - literally jeopardizing the program's finances. The same law also produced concrete Medicare reductions: it 'delays implementation of changes that the Biden administration made in 2023 to the Medicare Savings Programs, which provide subsidies for low-income Medicare beneficiaries ... until 2034,' and causes 'the loss of Medicare coverage for noncitizens.' Separately, SSA announced a workforce reduction from roughly 57,000 to a 50,000 target with field-office closures and an internal plan to halve field-office visits in FY2026 (reported; SSA's own release is not machine-fetchable, so this is treated as supporting color, not load-bearing). SYMMETRY TEST - The opposite-party benchmark for this promise type is an actual proposed benefit cut (e.g. chained-CPI), which would be MISALIGNED; Trump proposed none, so PARTIAL is not unfairly harsh. Conversely FULL is unavailable because the promise's own wording is absolute ('never do anything that will jeopardize'), and the official Trustees accounting shows his signature law did jeopardize solvency while trimming Medicare assistance. The revenue cut was pro-beneficiary in intent (lower tax on benefits) even as it hurt the trust fund, which is why this is genuinely mixed rather than MISALIGNED. Benefits protected, program finances and service delivery measurably harmed = kept in part, not in full. One unverified sub-claim in the prior rationale (that the FY2027 budget proposes no benefit reductions) could not be substantiated and is dropped; it does not change the outcome. Confidence 0.7 reflects a settled factual record with a real PARTIAL-vs-FULL judgment call at the margin.
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