A lot less for the diplomatic niceties
Trump’s budget proposals are what you’d expect from a loathsome human being like him.
If Americans were taken aback by the restrained, highly scripted President Trump that addressed Congress last month, they should recognize a lot more of the blustery, law-and-order candidate they elected in the budget blueprint the White House released on Thursday.
“If he said it on the campaign, it’s in the budget,” the president’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, told reporters in a Wednesday briefing previewing the proposal’s release.
That means more money—some $54 billion in extra defense spending—for the military generals Trump loves to quote so much, and a lot less for the diplomatic niceties and programs combatting climate change that he so often dismissed. The State Department sees a 28 percent cut in the administration’s budget request, with a chunk of it coming from foreign aid. “It is not a soft-power budget,” Mulvaney explained. “This is a hard-power budget, and that was done intentionally. The president very clearly wants to send a message to our allies and to our potential adversaries that this is a strong-power administration.”
That’s a prettified way of saying Trump wants to send a message to everyone that he believes in force and force alone. That’s a useful stance to take, in international relations and in life. Don’t ask, just grab them by the pussy. Don’t be bashful, tell malicious lies about people on Twitter. Don’t give reasons, just keep repeating your assertions. Don’t answer reporters’ questions, insult them instead. Don’t mess around with diplomacy and foreign aid, just bomb the shit out of everyone.
The Trump administration wants to eliminate federal funding of 19 agencies and commissions, including the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, the Legal Services Corporation, the Institute of Peace, and an interagency council on homelessness. Some of those have long been targets of conservatives in Congress, but Democrats are expected to fight aggressively for their preservation, and it’s likely they retain majority support to continue.
Beyond the programs targeted for elimination, the Trump budget puts nearly every domestic Cabinet department on the chopping block. In the Department of Education, dozens of school and teacher grant programs would go, and the popular college work-study program would see significant cuts. In the Department of Commerce, NOAA gets slashed by billions, including the complete elimination of $250 million in grants for coastal and marine management. Funding for the National Institutes of Health—an agency with some of the most bipartisan support in Congress—would drop by nearly $6 billion, a cut [of] 18 percent.
The pundits say lots of this won’t fly, but of course Donnie is (according to him) a genius negotiator, so no doubt what does fly will be bad enough.
I just discovered that this budget eliminates Meals on Wheels. Wtf? I was a volunteer with that for years, delivering hot lunches to sick/elderly folks who might otherwise go without. It fed them, checked on them, and helped them stay in their own homes. Not an expensive program, and directly benefited people you could obviously see needed help.
This is just wicked. I mean, there’s a lot of horror to go around, sure, but to me cutting government support for Meals on Wheels really emphasizes the brutish nature of this budget, and the administration which is shamelessly proposing it. I’m stunned. It just keeps getting worse.
Sastra, Trump is just eliminating what is not needed. We obviously do not need art, because that’s an obsession of the coastal elite, and because artists (true artists) might notice his lack of taste. Poets have long been a target of the state (using poet in the old fashioned way, that includes novelists and playwrights) because they can entertain while they subvert.
And food? Only for those who are not losers, and if you need Meals on Wheels, you are plainly a loser, and such a sad, pathetic person.
My granddad used Meals on Wheels after my grandmother died. He was not a loser. He worked hard his entire life, and it was hardly his choice for his body to desert him when he got old. Meals on Wheels has been a wonderful thing, helping older people stay a bit more independent.
Trump is an evil oligarch, the evilest kind of oligarch, and the people who voted for him are indeed a basket of deplorables. How any decent person could possibly vote for him is beyond me; to vote for Trump if you are a decent person is to suggest that you are uninformed, that at no time during the election did you listen to a speech, or hear a campaign commercial, or check on his website, because he was very out in the open about all of this, and about how truly sleazy he is. It was out there. And for people who did not vote for Trump to say that we must recognize the decency and humanity of people who did vote for Trump is…deplorable, if I may be permitted to use the word.
Dubya Bush at his worst never suggested gutting Meals on Wheels. He gutted a lot of important programs by diminishing their budget substantially, but the fact that those programs are still around for Trump to urinate on is evidence that he recognized limits. For the first in history, we have elected a president who recognizes absolutely no limits, and believes he is omnipotent and omniscient. (Surely even he can’t go the route of claiming to be omnibenevolent, so I left off that trait that doesn’t apply to God any more than to Trump).
Trump is not operating on his own, carefully crafting legislation into the wee hours of the night. I’m not sure if I’d be surprised if he was surprised that Meals on Wheels or any other specific program was eliminated: I don’t see him as a Detail Man. “Cut the waste,” he says, with a broad sweep of his hand — and then the evil minions get to work. They make the decisions and present the results with “we did what you told us.”
“Ah, so you did,” replies Trump, casting his eyes over a document he only pretends to read. And will then defend to the death.
If it were only Trump, or Bannon, or any of the bizarre cabal of trolls and troglodytes he’s surrounded himself with, it would be bad enough. But most of the mainstream Republicans are likely to go along with this outrageous attempt to gut science, the environment, the arts, and even Meals on F*cking Wheels in order to have the power to put their pet project into play. Yeah, Grandpa starves — but hey, we’re going to stop abortion!!!
Yes, they are all evil oligarchs. I feel totally justified in hating them all.
I have good news and bad news on this. The good news is that the vast majority of funding for Meals on Wheels comes from other government sources than this particular program being cut. The bad news is that this just means that a lot of programs will lose funding.
Kevin Drum at Mother Jones explains here
This is what Republicans are really like. These are the ‘values’ they actually represent. This is the kind of rhetoric that excites their ‘base.’
And this is what Obama was striving against for six solid years. While ‘progressives’ whine that he couldn’t make it rain jellybeans with his magic wand. I agree that all out war should have been declared in 2010. That far too much pretense of ‘bipartisan’ competence and sanity was maintained. But just LOOK at them!
Now if we could just get the media to report it that way, to tell the truth. No, it isn’t the case that everyone wants what is best for the country and we just disagree on what is best. These people do want poor people to stay poor, because they are an easily beaten down source of cheap labor that way. They want women to stay subservient, not just because of some vaguely defined “family values” but because women actually can compete effectively in the workplace if allowed, and they don’t want any challenges to their status or position, certainly not to their power. They want what they want, and they want it now,
In short, Republican’s are an entire party full of Verruca Salt’s.