Trump tells town hall he plans to cut entitlements, hopes to replace ObamaCare with 'something great'

The federal deficit has shot up under President Trump, due largely to a $1.5 trillion tax cut and bipartisan spending increases — Trump has insisted on hiking military spending, Democrats pushed to raise domestic programs. And so at a Fox News town hall in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Thursday, Martha McCallum argued that "if you don't cut something in entitlements, you'll never really deal with the debt." "Oh, we'll be cutting," Trump said, but he also promised that, presumably in a second term, the U.S. will see "growth like you never had before."

Entitlements refer to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and Trump has sent mixed signals on whether he wants to cut them. The Trump administration is also asking the Supreme Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act, and one of the town hall participants asked what Trump envisions as a replacement to ObamaCare. Trump wasn't real specific.

'What we'd like to do is totally kill [ObamaCare] but come up, before we do that, with something that's great," Trump said. He claimed that after failing to replace the Affordable Care Act in 2017, he made the choice to manage "the carcass of ObamaCare" rather than sabotage the law, and "we're managing it fantastically."

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