Donald Trump's preliminary budget proposal is out, and as expected, his White House is seeking a $54 billion increase in military spending, paid for by crippling cuts to the budgets of the State Department, the EPA, and various other entities that Trump has deemed extraneous to whatever it is he's trying to accomplish as President of the United States. The Washington Post has picked out a pattern in the things the administration is targeting for elimination. (Hint: it's not hard.)
The complete list of agencies and programs in the crosshairs, which the Post helpfully compiled here, is a moral outrage. It would wipe out programs that finance infrastructure development in the poverty-stricken Mississippi Delta, ensure that low-income Americans have access to legal services, provide nutritious meals to children in rural schools, fund job training programs for unemployed seniors, help poor Americans weatherproof their homes and pay their utility bills, and coordinate federal responses to the nation's homelessness crisis—among many, many others.
What do these things have in common? They attempt to mitigate problems that Donald Trump, a man who rides a gold-plated elevator to a penthouse apartment in a building that bears his name, has never encountered in his life. He understands and appreciates things like military power and gigantic explosions and big, swinging-dick battleships, much like a child fresh off his first weekend spent doing nothing but playing Call of Duty. As he's shown before, though, the president has no idea what it's like to be anything other than fabulously wealthy in America, and does not comprehend that his insistence on cruelly and systematically snipping away the threads of the safety net his constituents depend on will eventually cause it to break altogether.
This is what happens when you entrust an out-of-touch billionaire with the task of governing a nation in which some 43 million Americans fall below the poverty line. He promises to bring back the coal industry, but makes it harder for would-be miners to heat their homes in winter. He pledges to put veterans first, but quietly chokes out efforts to end homelessness. And he solemnly swears to ensure that the "forgotten man and women will be forgotten no longer," even as he makes it more likely that their children will go to bed hungry. This president wants to gut these programs not because they're unnecessary or ineffective or frivolous, but because he does not understand what they are or what they do, and does not care to find out.
This is not to say that the president needs to personally experience poverty in order to appreciate the gravity of what he proposes to do. But Trump, who pledged in his inaugural address to be a president for "all Americans," could at least try having a meaningful interaction with those who have. He is proving himself to be the lack of empathy president, and even as he spends more than $100 million in tax dollars on weekend trips to Mar-a-Lago this year, President Trump just wants to shut his eyes tightly, shrug his shoulders, and set the social safety net on fire.
