No one ever accused the Democrats of being competent at politics, but with President Donald Trump leading the opposition, it shouldn’t take much competence to win. Ordinarily, politicians look to twist their opponents’ words to put them in a more negative light. But Trump has done that job for them.
Last week, Trump said :
“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”
This is both an absurd statement — we have been paying for Medicare and Medicaid for six decades — and runs directly counter to Trump’s most fundamental campaign promise of putting America first. Trump insisted he would not get involved in foreign wars, especially in the Middle East, and defend these programs that more than 100 million people depend on. Now, Trump has flipped 180 degrees on putting America first. He says he only wants to pay for his wars and forget about people’s health care. And just to drive home the point, there was a reason Trump made this promise. Medicare and Medicaid are hugely popular; wars in the Middle East, and especially wars of choice, are not. Trump’s comments should be the reddest of red meat for Democrats looking to challenge Republican candidates this fall.
Trump’s military buildup is real money
It is also important to realize that Trump is proposing to use huge sums for his military. The media have made a practice of providing deliberately uninformative budget reporting. They routinely report huge numbers in the millions, billions and trillions, without any context , knowing that almost none of their readers have any comprehension of their meaning. But Trump’s budget request is real money, by any standard. The military budget for 2025 was $862 billion . Adjusting that up by 6% for inflation would put it at $914 billion in 2027. Instead, Trump is asking for $1.5 trillion, an increase of $584 billion, or 64%. And to be clear, this is for a single year. If this is summed over a decade, as is common in budget debates, it would be $5.8 trillion, far more than the huge tax bill Trump pushed through last summer (the “One Big Beautiful Bill”). It swamps everything else that becomes a huge debate topic in Washington. Yes, I did use this graph a couple of weeks ago, but that was when the issue was just the $200 billion that Trump was going to ask for his war in Iran . Now we’re looking at an even bigger military request. And I didn’t forget to include the bars for the Minnesota fraud that Trump constantly hypes, or the nixed funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. They are too small to see next to Trump’s military spending request. And just to be 100% clear, this demand for more military spending is entirely coming out of Donald Trump’s dementia. This is like when he said that he had to deploy National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., because people were scared to go out to restaurants. I lived in D.C. for more than a quarter-century and still know plenty of people there. This was lunacy. There are some high-crime areas (mostly poor and Black), but most of the city is very safe, and the restaurant industry was thriving. The vast majority of people would rather see their tax dollars go to something useful. Similarly, Trump was insisting that he needed to deploy National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, last summer and fall because the city was burning down. He said the stores had all closed down or were boarded up because people kept breaking the windows. This would be news to anyone in Portland, which is a beautiful, peaceful city with plenty of stores with big windows.
Trump’s big military request is more of this nonsense, but with a hugely larger price tag. Who are the enemies that we need to spend so much money to protect against? Russia, with an economy less than one-quarter the size of ours? China does have an economy that is one-third larger than ours, but until recently it was our largest trading partner, not an enemy. It is more than a bit crazy that Donald Trump is looking to make enemies around the world so that he can demand absurd amounts of military spending and then tell us we can’t afford to pay for health care and child care. This is not a tough question. Congress needs to tell Trump that he can’t have another $580 billion for unnecessary wars and an endless supply of big weapons for him and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to play with. The vast majority of people would rather see their tax dollars go to something useful.
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