Biden reappears to attack Trump: "In less than 100 days, they have done a lot of damage and destruction."

WashingtonFormer US President Joe Biden has reappeared less than 100 days after leaving office to make way for his successor (and predecessor), Donald Trump. Twelve weeks in which the Republican president has relentlessly pursued his ultra-right agenda and continued to attack the Democrat's legacy. Just this past Monday, Trump again blamed Biden for the war in Ukraine in a post on Truth Social. Biden has returned to the political arena to defend Social Security, a program that has already suffered from the cuts led by Elon Musk with the resulting consequences: website crashes, technical errors, and unanswered phone lines, among other problems.

"Now, in less than 100 days, this new administration has already done so much: so much damage and so much destruction. It could happen that, shortly, they will attack the administration of Social Security," Biden said during an event in Chicago organized by the National Conference of Lawyers, Counselors and Representatives. In the United States, Social Security provides financial support to individuals and families in areas ranging from retirement benefits, disability benefits, and tuition assistance, in addition to enrolling people in Medicare. It's a program that covers 73 million citizens and which Trump has accused without evidence of being a waste and fraud cessation.

At the end of March, the president signed an executive order suspending Social Security payments via physical checks. "For 90 years, since Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security, people have always received Social Security checks. They've received them during war, during times of crisis, during the pandemic. It didn't matter what. But now, for the first time in history, this could change," the former president warned, referring to the decision to end the lapses in payments to the half-million citizens who will be affected by the measure.

Shortly before Biden spoke in Chicago, Trump had also signed another executive order to "prevent illegal aliens and other ineligible individuals from obtaining" Social Security benefits. The reality is that most undocumented individuals are ineligible for the program's benefits. One of the few exceptions is children, who should be guaranteed free education from preschool through high school regardless of their immigration status, according to a landmark 1982 Supreme Court decision.

"Social Security is much more than a government program. It's the promise of Social Security paying your whole life," the 82-year-old former president argued, with much more force than at some points during the election campaign. Biden once again attacked the billionaires within the new administration—"By the way, the Secretary of Commerce is a billionaire"—and has focused on Social Security at a time when Republicans are proposing a comprehensive reform of the program.

"Why are these people going against Social Security now? Well, they're following this old premise of the start-ups technological. The phrase is: Move fast and break things", Biden has explained, claiming they want to reduce the size of Social Security to implement the massive tax cut Trump promised during the campaign and renew the tax cuts from his first term. "They want to make permanent the 2017 tax cut, which excessively benefits the richest citizens. Will they take it out? [...] What are the two big pots of money out there, in pure numbers? Social. Last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson successfully managed to process the budget framework from which to implement the massive tax cuts Trump is trumpeting.