With his war on Iran, Donald Trump has already landed a quadruple axel of political self-destruction: notching the most unpopular US war effort in modern history, splitting his own political coalition, seeing his approval rating dip below Joe Biden’s, and, for the first time, falling underwater with white working-class voters. 

Trump is peering over the edge of an electoral cliff come November, with the likely possibility that he drags the country and world into a completely avoidable and self-made economic crisis before then, all as the public seethes over his neglect of their core concern of affordability. It’s hard to see how the president could make this any worse for himself — but his crack team has found a way to pull it off.

The Trump administration’s genius next move? Make even deeper cuts to domestic programs to funnel even more obscene amounts of taxpayer money into this idiotic war.

Trump’s 2027 budget request — cooked up by his Office of Management and Budget director, lifelong anti-government zealot Russell Vought — envisions a massive 44 percent hike in military spending, taking the defense budget to a hard-to-believe $1.5 trillion. With Trump’s near-trillion-dollar military budget last year, the United States was already spending more on the military than the next nine of the world’s biggest military spenders combined. But this increase would mean US taxpayers would be footing the bill for a military budget that’s more than double that of the next five countries combined. (To underscore the absurdity, only two of those five are US adversaries.)

To reach this cartoonish number, Trump plans to make further pitiless cuts to the domestic programs Americans rely on during this period of runaway cost of living, amounting to a 10 percent cut to nonwar agencies. Here’s just some of what Trump and Vought are planning: 

• ending a $4 billion program helping low-income people afford their energy bills, just as Trump is set to make those bills skyrocket;
• by that same token, cutting tens of millions of dollars worth of renewable energy programs, which elsewhere in the world are helping countries weather the spike in fossil fuel prices;
• eliminating nearly $400 million for homeless assistance and another $529 million for assistance to poor or homeless people who have HIV, specifically;
• cutting $234 million to steer worker protection agencies away from what the budget document calls “harsh penalties” on employers who cheat and steal from their workers;
• killing $4.2 billion of funding for electric vehicle chargers, to make it as inconvenient as possible to switch from a gas-guzzler while Trump sends pump prices soaring;
• ending nearly half a billion dollars of funding for public transit, which the countries feeling the effects of Trump’s war earliest are desperately asking their citizens to use more in the face of looming fuel shortages;
• eliminating a $659 million Department of Agriculture program that funds local projects in poor rural areas;
• canceling $449 million worth of programs funded by the Economic Development Administration, which similarly pays for a variety of projects in economically struggling areas;
• cutting $386 million of funding for cleaning up ongoing contamination from the US military weapons program during the Cold War;
• and slashing $1.4 billion from the Internal Revenue Service, so that while the ordinary taxpayer is robbed to pay for a war they didn’t ask for, rich people can have an even easier time dodging their taxes.

In some ways, this does amount to an “America First” budget: that is, throwing Americans under the bus first to finance yet another president’s vanity war on a faraway continent.

Of course, given that it’s Vought, and given that it’s this particular administration, all of these cuts will be lazily justified as an attack on “woke” and “wasteful” programs — the same reasoning they used to disingenuously and pointlessly put hundreds of thousands of people out of work, make it harder to get your Social Security benefits, and slash Medicaid and food stamps, to name a few. But to the majority of Americans, who aren’t easily distracted by the shiny objects of Trump and Vought’s anti-woke buzzwords, most of this is not going to sound very appealing.

Besides the fact that this is essentially a political suicide note in budget form, there’s also the fact that Trump’s own secretary of state, Marco Rubio, just pointed to this exact kind of thing as a prime example of the Iranian regime’s own villainy. “Imagine an Iran that, instead of spending their wealth, billions of dollars, supporting terrorists or weapons, had spent that money helping the people of Iran,” he told George Stephanopoulos this past Monday.

Two days later, his president was saying this:

We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. . . . It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, 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.

A lot of this extra money will, in practice, be disbursed as handouts to military contractors to replenish equipment and resources that were damaged, destroyed, or expended in this needless war — some of which have dramatically lost their usefulness in the era of modern warfare, as revealed in the current conflict. If you’re wondering how much the continuing war effort is going to cost you personally, start your calculations with this: last month, the Pentagon asked Congress for a massive $200 billion, a sum bigger than the total amount the US taxpayer has footed for four years of the war in Ukraine, and roughly a quarter of the cost of a decade of direct US fighting in Vietnam, or about two years’ worth of the war in Afghanistan.

The keen-eyed reader might also notice that this sum outstrips the almost certainly inflated amount ($150 billion) that Elon Musk claimed to have “saved” by dismantling the federal government with his Department of Government Efficiency (or “DOGE”) project.

Trump spent three years complaining about US wealth being siphoned out and spent on Ukraine. Before that, he spent years charging that politicians had wasted the country’s treasure on foreign adventures instead of fixing the problems at home.

After all that, Trump has become the most over-the-top caricature of the indulgent warmongers he once pretended to despise: not someone who prioritizes endlessly bombing random countries over Americans’ well-being, but someone actively and eagerly prepared to make Americans’ lives worse and more expensive so he can do it with abandon. It’s a project he and his team are so committed to, it seems, that they’ll happily steer headfirst into political oblivion to keep it going.

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