Remember back during the primaries when we Democrats felt all we needed to do was stand back and watch while the Republican Party destroyed itself? That didn’t work out so well, did it?
Now we’re at Round 2. President Trump’s “budget”, such that it is—a 9.2% increase in defense coupled with a 9.2% cut for “everything else”—is the sort of budget someone who knows nothing about Congress would draw up. The idea is to make these things balance, right? Problem solved!
Well, no, because the problem is, federal budgets balance interests, not dollars. You can’t increase your program by cutting mine. You have to increase your program while increasing mine. Which is why federal budgets are so hard.
It’s “amusing” that “serious” men—I guess they’re all men—on the Republican side of the aisle in Congress are upset that Trump isn’t proposing to cut entitlements—Social Security and Medicare. Trump ran by promising not to cut entitlements, but so did House Speaker Paul Ryan, #DCprettyboynumberone, and so did all the Tea Party Republicans, and all the non-Tea Party Republicans. During their campaigns, Paulie and all the others promise to “protect” Social Security and Medicare, and then after they’re in they vote for fake budgets promising to make cuts, but not, you know, now—10 years from now.1 In other words, they’ll “order” a future Congress—10 years down the road—to make the cuts they lack the balls, or vaginas, or whatever, to make now. And they call that cutting entitlements.
Trump and Ryan are having similar problems “abolishing” ObamaCare. The situation is still “fluid”, as we say in DC. I am, naturally, hoping this will turn into a total trainwreck, but that’s probably too much to hope for. Trump is, basically, swallowing the entire Republican Party.2 What the resulting engorgement will look like is anyone’s guess. And whether it can fly is another. And whether we will still have a country left when it’s over is still another.
TRUMP SPEECH UPDATE
How did Trump’s Omigod he sounded like a president speech change things? Very little. Trump left out most of the bluster, but all the incoherent substance—spend like a motherfucker and cut taxes like a motherfucker—remained intact. Trump sans spittle is still Trump, and Republicans still don’t know how they’re going to do all the things Trump has said he’s going to do.
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As Jonathan Chait points out, while Ryan, and other Republicans, talk up cutting “entitlements”, the Republicans in the House as a whole have only voted for cutting Medicare. Social Security is still off limits. ↩︎
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The standard tactic of the swallowees is to point to stupid statements by leftists, which are not hard to find, and proclaim that the freaks make Trump look good! Hey, he must be doing something right! And, anyway, it’s kind of cozy in here, like being inside a whale! And all my friends are here too! ↩︎
