Mitch's Blog

Jamelle Bouie at The New York TImes:

If signed into law, the Senate version of Trump’s policy bill would slash $1.1 trillion from Medicaid and $186 billion from anti-poverty food assistance to help pay for trillions in tax breaks, including more than $564 billion in business tax cuts. By one estimate, these changes would result in at least 17 million people losing their health insurance over the next decade, as well as millions losing SNAP benefits, with some states possibly even ending their programs. All this so that the top 1 percent of households can receive an estimated average of a few tens of thousands of dollars each year.

But as irresponsible as this bill is, there is a dog-bites-man element to its existence. If we understand that Trump is, in most respects, an ordinary Republican president, then it is not news to learn that a Republican president wants to cut social services for the poor to sustain a large tax cut for the rich.

…

This reality extends, at least somewhat, to foreign policy.

What, so far, has been the signature foreign policy action of the Trump administration? A strike on Iran’s nuclear program. With one decision, Trump fulfilled the dreams of a generation of Republican hawks who have been clamoring for war with — and regime change in — Iran since President Bush proclaimed that it was a member of the “axis of evil” in 2002.

…

Across both the first Trump administration and this one, what you see are the longstanding goals of the Republican Party being fulfilled by a Republican president. What’s striking isn’t that this is happening, but that Trump, in his 10 years on the American political scene, has successfully obscured his rigidly partisan agenda with claims of populism and ideological heterodoxy. His occasional gestures toward support for existing social programs or greater taxes on the rich — and his willingness to say anything to amass power — are enough to persuade many voters (and some professional political observers) that Trump will somehow moderate the Republican Party or turn it away from its traditional agenda. If anything, it’s been the opposite: Trump’s willingness to do everything favored by his partisan fellow travelers has only accelerated the Republican Party’s dash toward ideological and policy extremism.

…

To look at the Trump administration and see something distinct from the past 44 years of Republican governance is to inhabit a fantasy in which past Republican presidents weren’t similarly contemptuous of legal and constitutional limits on their authority.

…

When George W. Bush left office in 2009, the United States was mired in two wars and the global economy was in free fall. When Donald Trump left office after his first term, the United States was mired in a deadly pandemic and its economy was recovering from a free fall. (And this is to say nothing of Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election in a desperate bid to stay in office.)

That’s two Republican presidencies over 20 years that ended in disaster. There is no reason to think that Trump’s second term will be the exception that breaks the rule.

Hamilton Nolan:

[Trump’s tax and immigration bill] contains enough money to build a new system of immigration detention centers far bigger than the entire federal prison system. The American Immigration Council says that it will be enough to facilitate the “daily detention of at least 116,000 non-citizens.” It will let ICE hire more field agents than the FBI. Its $170 billion in funding for Stephen Miller’s rabid campaign to purge America of brown people is comparable to the total annual funding for the United States Army.

…

This budget will give [Trump] the final piece of the puzzle that he needs to achieve his fever dream: a nationwide army of masked, unaccountable armed agents empowered to snatch anyone they like off the streets, and the physical infrastructure to imprison or deport those people at will. Thousands of men with guns, unrestrained by judges or local police, who do not answer to Congress, who point guns at the press, who arrest whoever they want, for reasons they do not share, and do whatever they wish with those people. The implications of this are going to make America a much darker place.

…

Yesterday, Trump proudly attended the opening of a concentration camp. There will be many more to come.