With his war on Iran, Donald Trump has already landed a quadruple axel of political self-destruction: notching the most unpopular US war effort in modern history, splitting his own political coalition, seeing his approval rating dip below Joe Biden’s, and, for the first time, falling underwater with white working-class voters.
Trump is peering over the edge of an electoral cliff come November, with the likely possibility that he drags the country and world into a completely avoidable and self-made economic crisis before then, all as the public seethes over his neglect of their core concern of affordability. It’s hard to see how the president could make this any worse for himself — but his crack team has found a way to pull it off.
The Trump administration’s genius next move? Make even deeper cuts to domestic programs to funnel even more obscene amounts of taxpayer money into this idiotic war.
Trump’s 2027 budget request — cooked up by his Office of Management and Budget director, lifelong anti-government zealot Russell Vought — envisions a massive 44 percent hike in military spending, taking the defense budget to a hard-to-believe $1.5 trillion. With Trump’s near-trillion-dollar military budget last year, the United States was already spending more on the military than the next nine of the world’s biggest military spenders combined. But this increase would mean US taxpayers would be footing the bill for a military budget that’s more than double that of the next five countries combined. (To underscore the absurdity, only two of those five are US adversaries.)
To reach this cartoonish number, Trump plans to make further pitiless cuts to the domestic programs Americans rely on during this period of runaway cost of living, amounting to a 10 percent cut to nonwar agencies. Here’s just some of what Trump and Vought are planning:
- ending a $4 billion program helping low-income people afford their energy bills, just as Trump is set to make…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
