Trump's Total War Budget
“More bombs, less of everything else” is a tough campaign platform.
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Last week, President Trump called for the culmination of a 45-year Republican dream and did so in a way designed to do maximum damage to the GOP — not to mention the country.
That dream is the utter destruction of the US safety net and the unlimited expansion of the US military.
“The United States can’t take care of daycare,” Trump blustered during a speech to faith leaders on Wednesday. “That has to be up to a state. We’re fighting wars. Medicaid, Medicare — they can do it on a state basis. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. But all these little scams that have taken place, you have to let states take care of them.”
Two days later, Trump proposed a 2027 fiscal year budget with a defense spending increase of 42 percent, or $445 billion, to a staggering total of $1.5 trillion. The budget calls for reducing non-defense spending by 10 percent through the elimination of “woke, weaponized, and wasteful programs” — including steep cuts to the Internal Revenue Service, Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, and defunding the National Endowment for Democracy. Trump also called for massive budget cuts to the National Institutes of Health.
Democrats have said the document is dead on arrival — though Trump hopes to pass a big chunk of it through reconciliation without Democratic votes.
The budget does not, at least initially, include cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. It also does not include funding for Trump’s war against Iran, which he also hopes to pass through a reconciliation process without Democratic support. But it points the way clearly toward a distinctively Republican future for America — one in which the populace is transformed into an impoverished mass of hunger and disease, emitting occasional hoarse pleas for castoffs from oligarchs.
Patty Murray, the top democrat on the Senate appropriations committee, said it is a “bleak and unacceptable” vision. It’s one that is likely to be incredibly unpopular, throwing a lead anchor to the GOP’s already rapidly sinking midterm prospects.
From Star Wars to orange wasteland
An enormous part of Trump’s defense request is the $185 billion “Golden Dome” missile defense shield. The “Golden Dome” is supposed to put systems in orbit to detect and shoot down missiles aimed at the US.
For those who remember the 1980s, this probably sounds familiar. Ronald Reagan envisioned a very similar space doohickey which he called “Star Wars” or the Strategic Defense Initiative. The system cost some $60 billion between 1983, when Reagan first proposed it, and 1999, when Bill Clinton finally shelved it as nonviable.
While Reagan was pouring dollars into his fantasy military boondoggle and into military spending more generally to the tune of $181 billion, he slashed social programs by $141 billion. That included brutal cuts to school lunch programs for one million poor children, and other attacks on the safety net justified in no small part through racist demagoguery, including smearing “welfare queens.”
Reagan then added the biggest cuts to business taxes in history, which along with more tax giveaways to the wealthy added up to $750 million in lost revenue overall. Small wonder that under Reagan the debt ballooned dramatically, from $997 billion to $2.85 trillion.
Following Reagan, the GOP spent the next 40 years insisting that the debt was a huge problem, and that the way to solve it was through massive tax cuts, shredding the safety net, and unlimited defense spending — the same budget-busting formula that Reagan perfected.
Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein explains this as a GOP war on budgeting: “Conservatives believe that each program, and every tax, should be judged on its own merits. If a spending program is necessary, like missile defense, then it should be fully funded. If not, it should not be funded.”
Republicans loathe the idea of balancing spending and revenue. When Speaker Mike Johnson says things like “we have a $36 trillion federal debt” so “we need to pay down the credit card,” he’s not actually calling for less spending and more revenue. He’s calling for less spending on the poor and more money for the rich. And also more guns.
Johnson, though, is just canny enough to play the Reagan game of pretending to be a deficit hawk. Trump, in contrast, just shrieks the not very quiet part through a bullhorn: “We have to take care of one thing: military protection” and everything else is just a “scam.”
Bombs are virtuous; oligarchs are virtuous. Feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, providing housing for all — that’s a pointless swindle, unbecoming a manly nation of guns and death and hate.
Trump’s budget priorities are wildly unpopular
Americans have had Trump’s budgeting priorities shoved down their throats for more than a year. His budget bill last year cut taxes for the rich by $1 trillion while cutting more than $1.1 trillion from SNAP, Medicaid, and other safety net programs.
It also poured $85 billion into ICE, giving the immigration enforcement agency a larger, more bloated annual budget than all other law enforcement agencies combined, according to Lauren-Brooke Eisen of the Brennan Center for Justice. Trump and the Republican Congress also let ACA subsidies expire; 20 million people saw their insurance costs rise 114 percent at the beginning of this year.
This assault on the safety net has made Trump very unpopular; he’s been 20 points or more underwater in polling on social programs and healthcare for a month now. Similarly, immigration used to be one of Trump’s best issues. But after his supercharged ICE goons committed high-profile murders in Minneapolis, the agency’s approval cratered. A recent poll showed it hitting 59 percent disapproval.
Trump’s war of aggression with Iran is even less popular. A poll last week showed 61 percent of Americans disapproving of Trump’s handling of the conflict, with only 37 percent approving. Analyst G. Elliott Morris pointed out that non-MAGA Republicans — about half the GOP — have swung from +25 approval of the war in early March to -23 now. That’s a nearly 50 point swing, and suggests a dangerous collapse of Trump’s support on what is currently the defining issue of his presidency.
Faced with disastrous polling overall and a building revolt within his own coalition, the logical thing to do would be to try to find a different approach, or at least to change the conversation. But doubling down on violence and cruelty is Trump’s only move, and the GOP has been embracing the same failed and unpopular policies for decades.
So Trump has decided, in his infinite wisdom and in the middle of a vastly unpopular war, to spend the months before the midterm elections talking about how the GOP wants to slash the social safety net in order to pay for more and more and more and more war. Or, as Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker put it, “Donald Trump doesn’t care about you. He is using your tax dollars to fund another war in the Middle East while working families can’t afford health care. So much for America First.”
As Pritzker’s comments suggest, Democrats are eager to fight the midterms on the ground of funds for war vs. funds for healthcare. As for Republicans in Congress, Politico reports that they are not looking at the budget process with great lightness of heart. Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee said he was “very wary of voting for excessive spending in defense.” Sen. Mitch McConnell, chair of the Pentagon spending panel, expressed concern that pushing defense spending through reconciliation was not a stable or appropriate approach. And we know from January, when 17 House Republicans defied leadership to vote to extend ACA subsidies, that a lot of swing state Republicans are not eager to embrace Trump’s message of poverty at home to pay for murdering Iranian school children.
That’s never been a popular equation. But through appeals to racism and hatred of the poor and lies about their own commitment to budget austerity, the GOP has nonetheless been able to continue to advance their punitive budgeting priorities. Trump’s more open version seems poised to provoke one of the biggest rebukes that vision has ever received. It’s up to Democrats, though, and to us, to make sure that midterm victories are translated into real peace and real prosperity — and that we don’t return again, endlessly, to wars, in the stars and on the ground.
That’s it for today
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Hope tomorrow is the day I wake up to his obituary
The Democrats have a real opportunity to radically change the perceived political wisdom of the Republicans being good economic managers and tax cuts are always a good thing. I wish I could be confident that they will successfully grasp it.