How to Turn Trump’s Judge Attacks Against Him: Social Security
Trump wants to impeach the judge who saved our private Social Security data from Elon Musk. There are many reasons Democrats should talk about that.
Written by Andrew Bates
In the Biden-Harris Administration, I was the White House spokesperson for judicial nominations. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are trying to fire judges if they stop this corrupt, out-of-control administration from breaking the law.
It’s clear that Trump wants to frame debates about his abuse of power around issues he believes work to his advantage. As Democrats, we cannot accept that.
Trump is adept at distraction and spin, which lets him minimize his biggest vulnerabilities. That means our party needs to become experts in segueing back to the issues Trump doesn’t want Americans to think about.
Fox News wrote days ago, “The latest Fox News poll as well as other recent surveys point to growing skepticism about Trump’s economic actions and policies.” Fox continued, “Polls indicate independents are currently giving Trump a thumbs down on his handling of the economy.”
Like Fox’s polling shows, Trump does NOT want his critics to highlight that he’s wrecking the economy by selling middle-class families out to the super rich; that he’s raising the prices he promised to lower with tariff taxes on the middle class that literally fund tax giveaways to billionaires and multinational corporations.
Last week provided a model of how to short-circuit Trump’s manipulation and keep the focus where he does not want it.
Republicans hope a debate about impeaching judges will divert Americans’ attention from how he’s betraying ordinary voters to the elite establishment he swore to fight. The GOP thinks that because one of the many cases Trump’s losing in court deals with immigration, they can make any conversation about judges center on the lie that Democrats somehow don’t want to deport violent gang members.
Across the board, they’re wrong. For one thing, Democrats do want to deport violent criminals who came into the country illegally. We just don’t want innocent people swept up with them.
But more broadly, when Republicans talk about impeaching judges, they are giving us an opportunity to show that corruption has a tangible, economic price — and it’s everyday people who pay it. When Trump raises the impeachment of judges, there’s another case that Democrats should steer the discussion toward. One that exemplifies how defending the rule of law from Trump’s criminal overreach isn’t abstract or elitist, but critical to the economic needs of middle-class families.
It’s this. Elon Musk’s staff were caught illegally poring through Americans’ personal Social Security data, compromising our most personal information. A federal judge is the reason they were stopped. In a court order, DOGE was blasted for gaining “unbridled access to the personal and private data of millions of Americans, including but not limited to Social Security numbers, medical records, mental health records, hospitalization records, drivers’ license numbers, bank and credit card information, tax information, income history, work history, birth and marriage certificates, and home and work addresses.”
What happened next? Did Musk apologize? Did the richest man in the world — who happily laid off federally-employed veterans with the best performance reviews possible — terminate a single one of his own aides when they illegally invaded Americans’ financial, medical, and personal privacy? No. Apparently, the Trump Administration does not respect federal employees who risked their lives for our freedom and safety nearly as much as Musk’s yes-men.
Instead, the Trump Administration wanted to remove that judge and cut off all Social Security benefits.
Trump’s head of the Social Security Administration angrily reacted to the court order by saying he wanted “to turn [Social Security] off and let the courts figure out how they want to run a federal agency.” Who’s going to tell him that none of his predecessors, Republican or Democrat, thought violating the law and handing our most personal information over to a corrupt billionaire was part of their job description?
Social Security is exactly the kind of high-priority economic issue Democrats should pivot to, overriding Trump’s diversions. Republican strategists agree. On Sunday, NBC reported, “Trump allies press the White House to dial back Elon Musk's media interviews over his Social Security jabs,” including calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.”
There’s a lot to work with on this issue once you’ve taken the opening. For example, today, The Washington Post wrote, "Long waits, waves of calls, website crashes: Social Security is breaking down." DOGE has slashed the Social Security workforce, making it much harder for recipients to contact the agency. Trump and Musk have also been rapidly closing a host of Social Security offices that Americans rely on, especially in rural areas. At the same time, they’re demanding that recipients come into the remaining offices in person, without any regard for the fact that a large percent of them have limited mobility. Why are elderly and disabled Americans being forced into this needless Catch-22, being told they have to haul themselves into a shrinking number of Social Security offices, traveling who knows how far? Because Donald Trump and Elon Musk — both billionaires — would rather spend that money on tax handouts for the super rich.
The next day, Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick — another billionaire — showed how little this administration cares about the honest people whose lives they’re turning upside down. Lutnick said that if Social Security “didn’t send out their checks this month, my mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month.”
That’s one of the most out-of-touch things I’ve ever heard in my life.
But that egotistical dismissal of the Americans Trump promised to fight for holds the key to turning narratives around, and to ensuring that Americans know as much as possible about how Trump has double-crossed them financially before voting in the 2026 midterms. Republicans are so in bed with the rich establishment they promised to stand up against that they want to fire the judge standing between a corrupt billionaire and our Social Security data. And the administration that assured us they'd protect Social Security is stripping the Social Security Administration down to parts in the name of tax welfare for the rich.
Andrew Bates was the White House Senior Deputy Press Secretary in the Biden-Harris Administration and a national spokesperson on the Biden campaign in 2020.
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This is brilliant, and a must read
Now all we need is a media to report the biggest whistleblower case in American history and how Trump did everything possible to hide it from the public. https://youtu.be/WZC7vF_g6fo