Yesterday Donald Trump revealed his budget proposal for the next fiscal year. As you might have expected, it calls for huge increases in defense spending, some $8.6 billion more for his personal obsession, the Mexican border wall, and a trillion-dollar-plus deficit.
Not surprisingly, it breaks all sorts of promises President Trump made while campaigning, such as a promise not to cut Social Security or Medicare; this budget would end up cutting Medicare by nearly a trillion dollars over the next decade.
This budget won’t be enacted in anything like its current form, of course, especially now that the Democrats have a sizable majority in the House of Representatives. But there’s one curious proposal in this budget that says everything you need to know about this man.
For the third year in a row, he is trying to eliminate nearly all the $300 million spent for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which helps clean up pollution, fight against invasive species, preserve habitats, and otherwise help maintain the lakes.
Doing that makes no sense whatsoever from any point of view. The five Great Lakes are by far the most important source of fresh water in the Western Hemisphere. They are also the source of a multi-billion dollar recreational fishing and boating industry, and vital to our continued survival as a species.
We should probably be spending more on this program, not less. Fortunately, there is very little threat that these funds will be cut at all. Republican lawmakers from the Great Lakes states were almost as vehement as Democrats in denouncing the idea of cutting this funding.
“You can expect a strong, bipartisan, Michigan-led effort to once again protect every penny of this critical program,” said Republican Congressman Fred Upton of Kalamazoo, now the dean of the state’s congressional delegation.
Why Trump keeps attempting to destroy this program is also baffling in a political sense. Polls show that funding to protect the lakes is strongly supported by voters in the Great Lakes states. Donald Trump was elected three years ago because he managed to win the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania, all of which voted twice for Barack Obama.
There’s no way he can possibly be reelected next year without winning most of those. Other presidents of both parties have, of course, made bad policy decisions.
But there is a daily toxicity about this man and his government that is steadily corroding our politics and our lives, and that, to my alarm, seems more and more normal.
It isn’t just his constant lies, lies that have become so common they seldom cause a stir any more. Five years ago, no one could have imagined a president saying, “the Democrats have become an anti-Israel party. They’ve become an anti-Jewish party, and that’s too bad.”
No one could have imagined a President of the United States saying there were “good people” among a neo-Nazi mob in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Nor could anyone have imagined a president ignoring and insulting our long-time allies and spending a vast amount of time romancing our traditional enemies, like North Korea.
But that’s what we’ve got. Traditional journalists are under a handicap, not just since they are taught to be impartial. The trouble is, they are conditioned to make what Carl Bernstein called a “presumption of regularity” about those in power.
The trouble is that there is nothing regular, decent or honest about this President, who knows little about the separation of powers, our sacred traditions, or how government is supposed to work; what’s more, he’s made it clear that he couldn’t care less. Every one of us needs to say “this can’t be tolerated,” and act on that, in every way possible. Otherwise, we may not have a country or a democracy worth defending.
