During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to save Social Security and to protect Medicare. But since he made those commitments he seems to have gotten much closer to Paul Ryan, and his views on privatizing Social Security and Medicare, suggesting that the Republicans under a Trump Administration will convert Medicare into a voucher program and go along with Ryan’s campaign to privatize Social Security.

The Republicans will need a fog of confusion to push and pass Ryan’s privatization bill. Ryan will, as he always does, rely on austerity ideology, developed over the years by the network of organizations surrounding the Peter G. Peterson Foundation (PGPF). He will talk endlessly about the national debt and about the role of entitlements in driving it.

And he will also talk endlessly about how government financial constraints that we can do nothing about other than decrease spending, prevent us from expanding the safety net, or even from maintaining it at the present level. That is, he will present the problem of the national debt as a problem of financial constraints, and not as a political problem which can easily be solved if he were only willing to use Congress’s authority to create more net financial assets in the form of money that is not accompanied by further private sector debt.

Speaker Ryan will talk about all the spending cuts that must be made to save the nation from likely insolvency caused by the safety net crowding out all Federal expenses. But he won’t talk about tax increases, only about tax cuts focused squarely on the wealthy for “growing the economy.”

And he won’t talk anymore about balanced budgets, because he knows that Donald Trump wants $1 Trillion in infrastructure spending and increases in the defense budget, and that all the spending and tax cuts he has in mind, won’t “pay for” both the infrastructure and defense increase and the huge tax cuts Trump wants.

So, he will advocate for deficits in order to grow the economy, and he will try to make a deal with Trump to get Medicare and Social Security privatized. The big question is whether Trump will go for this deal.

It would nakedly violate his clear campaign pledges to protect SS and Medicare, and it would precipitate a long term campaign by the Democrats charging Trump, Ryan, and the Republicans with waging a War on Seniors, the ads for which will almost write themselves for the 2018 Congressional elections.

Nevertheless, Trump may be willing to do this deal if it is phased in over time to protect current Medicare and SS recipients until they die off, and if its infrastructure component is structured in such a way that Trump’s own companies will benefit sufficiently from it to make it worth his while to break his pledge to seniors and people who care about them. Ryan will do it to win favor from his Koch and PGPF supporters who would succeed in their life-long objective to get rid of these New Deal and Great Society programs.

So, are we about to get an austerity-driven rationale for privatizing entitlements under a Trump Administration using the various myths exposed in this article? The chances are good. But it is also true that Trump apparently does not believe that the Federal government can ever default on its obligation because it can just “print the money.”

So, based on his own true belief, he can have his big tax cuts for the wealthy and his entitlement protection and infrastructure promises, and at the same time escape the “War on Seniors” business, if he’s willing to create the money necessary to avoid issuing more debt. He won’t be able to print the money, of course, because that’s the Federal Reserve’s baliwick. But he will be able to “mint it”, and then get his minted many – trillion dollar coin converted into reserves (electronic credits) after depositing it in Treasury’s accounts at the Fed.

President-elect Trump may not be willing to resist such an outcome in order to please Paul Ryan’s need to kill the social safety net. To get it, all he has to do is to organize Republicans in both Houses who will vote with him against Paul Ryan if necessary, and then add to their numbers the members of the Democratic caucuses in both Houses anxious to both save entitlements and deficit spend on infrastructure.

Yes, Trump doesn’t need virtually all the Republicans in the Congress to vote with him to pass the programs he wants. He can always deal with the Democrats on a deal-by-deal basis and still get what he wants even if the Koch and Peterson Republicans don’t like it.