Soaking the Poor

 Well, Trump has unveiled his new budget request for the coming fiscal year—and it appears to be a nightmarish exaggeration of a classically evil GOP wish list. It proposes to spend 1.5 trillion more dollars next year on the military, as Trump wages an illegal war of aggression in the Middle East and routinely threatens similar invasions in Latin America. 

And how does he propose to pay for this? By slashing safety net programs for the poor, of course. 

The budget request itself is somewhat coy about this. It spends more time prating about how Trump will find all these savings by further defunding "woke" federal programs, etc. But Trump himself—in a leaked video of a lunchtime conversation with private donors that the White House itself idiotically posted online, before scrambling to take it down—said the quiet part out loud. 

"It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things," he said. The states, he suggested, should bear the burden of paying for all those safety net and entitlement programs that meet Americans' basic needs for nutrition and health care. 

What the U.S. government ought to be spending money on instead, he suggested, was more bombs and missiles. "We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country," he told the donors. 

I am reminded of what Thomas Carlyle once said of the government leaders of his era, in Past and Present—why is it, he wished to know, that Parliament always seemed to find money in the budget to "shoot the French"—but there was never enough left over "to keep the English living"?

So too with Trump. He seems eager to spend more debt-funded taxpayer dollars on killing Iranian schoolchildren. But nary a cent more for helping Americans keep body and soul together. 

So much for all those who said "Trump is defunding foreign aid because we have to help people here first." Turns out, what should have been obvious all along remains true: the same reasons Trump despises poor people overseas and is happy to see them starve or perish of preventable diseases are why he is happy to strip poor Americans of health care and food stamps.

Indeed, his budget lays bare perfectly how he actually sees the world. He proposes to spend more federal money on the "beautification" of Capitol Hill, for instance, at the same time he talks about defunding food stamps and Medicaid. Why? Because he considers it his own back yard. He has to look at it every day.

Keep in mind that the keystone of Trump's prior "beautification" efforts in the same neighborhood—by the way—has been evicting the homeless. 

In other words, Trump loves big government—he just wants this government to devote itself solely and completely to the task of enriching himself and his cronies, and improving the amenities of their pampered daily existence, while simultaneously grinding the faces of the poor into the dirt. 

I'm reminded of Yeats's disturbing image of the fascioid-"aristocratic" future that Orwell quotes in his essay on the Irish poet: "great wealth everywhere in a few men's hands, all dependent upon a few, up to the Emperor himself, who is a God dependent on a greater God, and everywhere, in Court, in the family, an inequality made law."

Orwell's gloss on the passage seems equally timely: "in a single phrase, 'great wealth in a few men's hands', Yeats lays bare the central reality of Fascism, which the whole of its propaganda is designed to cover up. The merely political Fascist claims always to be fighting for justice: Yeats, the poet, sees at a glance that Fascism means injustice, and acclaims it for that very reason."

So too, Trump's apologists have always insisted he is a "populist"; but Trump himself is much more straightforward about this: his goal is to make himself rich, and his pals rich, and to evict and impoverish the unsightly and inconvenient poor at even turn, for the crime of merely existing. 

"This is, no doubt, an emotional response," as the philosopher Brian Barry once wrote in a wonderfully and quite deservedly acerbic book review of a libertarian manifesto; "but there are, I believe, occasions when an emotional response is the only intellectually honest one."

One of these occasions, Barry wrote, was when someone from a "lofty" position of eminence "is proposing to starve or humiliate ten percent or so of his fellow citizens (if he recognizes the word) by eliminating all transfer payments through the state, leaving the sick, the old, the disabled, the mothers with young children and no breadwinner, and so on, to the tender mercies of private charity[.]"

And indeed—in his lunch with his private donor cronies—did not Trump all but concede that that is precisely his plan?