The $846 billion in Medicare cuts creates a messaging problem for Republicans for 2020. It is going to be challenging for them to run on "socialist Democrats" trying to get Medicare for everybody when their president is proposing such drastic cuts to one of the country's most popular programs.
One Democratic 2020 hopeful, Sen. Bernie Sanders, jumped right on message. "Make no mistake about it: Trump's budget is a massive transfer of wealth from the working class to the wealthiest people and most profitable corporations in America." Democrats can also point to 2015 when then-candidate Trump insisted he would "save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security without cuts" and that it was "not fair" to cut these programs when people have been paying into them.
The White House is going to try to argue that these really aren’t cuts at all, that it's cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse" but those words aren’t going to go very far when hospitals and seniors on Medicare start feeling the hurt. "The impact on care for seniors would be devastating," said Chip Kahn, president and CEO of the Federation of American Hospitals. "Hospitals are less and less able to cover the cost of care for Medicare patients; it is no time to gut Medicare."
"Gut Medicare" is the message voters are going to hear. Democrats are going to make sure of that, even those who aren't running for president in 2020. "It totally eviscerates any integrity to their already pretty flimsy attack," Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal said. "This assault on Medicare lays bare the real Republican agenda, which is to destroy the health-care safety net. They have no shred of intellectual underpinning or integrity to their attack on Democrats if they make this kind of proposal."
The only ideas Republicans have on health care are bad ones. This budget, even though it won't become law, establishes those bad ideas as Republican orthodoxy. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has famously and repeatedly said, "Show me your budget, show me your values." That's exactly what Trump and Republicans have done.