Killer budget

The federal budget that the Trump administration just submitted to Congress is the latest example of the accelerating upside-down class war waged by the GOP from the Reagan to the Trump administrations. It also reflects the newest twist in the even longer Republican effort to maintain or even restore white supremacy, which began in 1968 with Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and continues today with Trump’s crusade to keep out black and brown immigrants and boot out those already here.

Let’s get down to specifics. The administration is proposing, among other things, to cut $2 trillion in the next ten years from programs such as disability benefits, Medicaid, Social Security, and relief for student debtors. Out of about $4 trillion in budget cuts the administration plans over the next ten years, it wants to take about half of that amount out of the hide of the middle class, the poor, the sick, and the young.

Trump’s huge tax cut for the rich in 2017 was supposed to pay for itself. Instead, it made the deficit soar. Now Trump and his Republican clan want to recoup a part of that gift to the wealthy, who didn’t need it, by squeezing money from the vulnerable who need every dollar and got nothing out of the tax cut. That’s upside-down class war with a vengeance.

The biggest item in the budget on the white supremacy side of the GOP agenda is the $2 billion Trump is asking for his most pathological obsession, the Wall. He knows he doesn’t have a chance in hell of getting the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives to give him a cent for the border wall. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called the whole idea of the wall “immoral.” Her caucus abhors the idea of the wall at least as much as Pelosi.

This budget is dead on arrival. Why insist on an unattainable goal? To rally the xenophobes against the Democrats, to throw another wrench into the wheels of government and then blame Congress for doing nothing.

This is a budget of death in other ways too. Cutting the safety net has life and death implications. The anti-immigrant crusade, especially the border wall, also claims lives.

Looking at the budget as a whole further demonstrates the extent to which this is a death budget. It’s not just the fact that Trump’s proposal cuts money for human needs while throwing gobs of money at the swollen military budget. It is that Trump’s budget is a virtual declaration of a new arms race. Trump is asking for two new types of nuclear war heads and two new types of missiles. China and Russia are bound to take that as a highly aggressive move and respond in kind.

The atomic scientists who set the doomsday clock will soon be moving the time closer to the zero hour. A new and more dangerous Cold War may be about to begin.

Starting a new Cold War is bad enough, but since his impeachment Donald Trump has, incredibly, become more dangerous and vicious than ever. He took the fact that he could line up all but one (Mitt Romney, to his eternal credit) of the Republicans in the Senate to follow him on the way to ignominy as license to do even crazier things than what got him impeached.

He has used his power to punish his enemies, real and perceived, including military officers and one ambassador.

He has perverted the course of justice in the case of one of his pals, the convicted felon Roger Stone, prompting a furious reaction from the prosecutors at the Department of Justice.

He has concluded that if he got away with the Russia deal and the abortive Ukraine deal, he can get away with anything.

So far, he has been proved right, which makes this moment a most dangerous one for the world, the nation, and American democracy.

The good news is that the American voters can stop Trump in November. The bad news is that after being impeached Trump’s popularity increased to its highest level.

Which brings me to this heretical question: Do the American people have exactly the leader they deserve?