Where Trump and Biden Stand on the Issues, From Abortion to Immigration

Mr. Trump’s campaign has indicated that he would neither cut Social Security and Medicare benefits nor raise taxes to fund them, and has not given any details on how he would keep them solvent.

His team suggested that the economy would be stronger under Mr. Trump, and that could strengthen the programs in the long term. But a stronger economy alone is unlikely to make them solvent.

His campaign quickly sought to clarify ambiguous remarks he made in March, when he told CNBC that he might be open to cuts. “There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements,” he said in the interview, but his campaign said afterward that he had been talking about cutting “waste,” not benefits.

In 2023, he said Republicans should not “cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security to help pay for Joe Biden’s reckless spending spree,” though the programs’ funding gap predates the Biden administration.

In 2020, he suggested that he would “at some point” be open to cuts, then backtracked. As president, he proposed cutting the Social Security budget in part by more aggressively combating fraud.

Projections fluctuate based on economic conditions, but estimates from this spring indicate that if policies continue unchanged, Social Security will run out of money to cover full benefits by 2035, and part of Medicare by 2036.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Trump called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” and said it should be privatized. He dropped that position during his first presidential campaign, as well as his previous support for raising the retirement age to 70. The current retirement age for anyone born in 1960 or later is 67.