When Trump does something good, I write positive columns. When he does something bad, I write critical columns.

This strikes me as the honest and fair approach when analyzing any public official or political party.

Today, I’m going to (mostly) defend the president.

In a column for the New York Times, Steven Rattner listed 11 promises that Trump supposedly has broken.

In some cases, he’s right (at the risk of understatement, Trump has neither balanced the budget nor paid down the debt).

In other cases, he’s perhaps being premature (maybe, just maybe, gas will fall below $2 per gallon once – or if – the Middle East calms down).

But Rattner is completely wrong with regards to one of Trump’s alleged broken promises. Here’s the part of his column that deals with the Medicaid program (the government’s health entitlement for lower-income residents).

So what’s wrong with Rattner’s assertion?

Everything.

I went to the Congressional Budget Office website and found the data for Medicaid spending (see Table 3-1). As you can see, there have been no cuts to the program.

So how would Rattner justify his chart?

The answer can be found in this chart from the Debt Dispatch. As you can see, Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill did make some reforms to slow the growth of Medicaid spending.

Rattner looked at the gap between the black line and the dashed-blue line and decided that slower spending growth is a cut.

Needless to say, this is dishonest (as I explained to C-Span way back in 1990 and then to John Stossel in 2012).

The bottom line is that people who read the New York Times will think Trump has lowered Medicaid spending, not merely reduced the program’s rate of growth.

Shame on Steven Rattner. He had plenty of accurate critiques against Trump. He sullied his article, however, with his misleading analysis of Medicaid.

P.S. Rattner’s fiscal analysis leaves something to be desired, as I wrote in 2013, 2017, and 2025.