Trump's Total War Budget
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. “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.”
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.
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