Once upon a time, Donald Trump endeared himself to millions of working-class voters by telling them he, unlike the rest of the Republican Party, would do “everything within my power not to touch Social Security, to leave it the way it is.” While the GOP platform explicitly rejected the idea the program was untouchable and promised only to keep it unchanged for “current retirees and those close to retirement,” Trump told voters he “want[ed] to keep Social Security intact” while “they want to cut it very substantially, the Republicans.”

Fast-forward nine years, and Trump has become just another Republican president launching an assault on Social Security. Not even two months into his presidency, Trump is not only constantly verbally attacking the program in a way meant to justify debilitating cuts but is already actively making those cuts.

After weeks of charging that Social Security payments were going to tens of millions of dead people, Trump made the claim a major part of his address to Congress this past week, where he said there were “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program.” This was no offhand mention: the claim took up more than two-and-a-half minutes in the speech, or four full four paragraphs, with Trump listing in tedious detail the millions of Americans in various age groups over one-hundred years old still in the Social Security databases.