It wasn’t true of course, but there was at least a measure of honesty in President Trump’s assertion, made during a private Easter luncheon on April 1, that it is simply “not possible” for the federal government to pay for things like Medicare, Medicaid, and child care. Services like these, he opined, should be left to the states, so that the government can fund his aggression abroad: “We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare…. You can’t do it on a federal [sic]. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.” Sure, states would need to raise taxes to pay for these programs, but Trump would “lower our taxes a little bit to help them out.”
Democrats across the country were quick to seize on these remarks as fodder for their midterm campaigns, while Trump’s spokespeople claimed, implausibly, that the president was merely referring to the need to root out blue-state “fraud.” Whatever the spin, the costs of Trump’s war in Iran have already been astronomical: about $12 billion in the first six days alone and $1 billion per day since then.
Experts believe that the true cost of the war in Iran will likely exceed $1 trillion before it concludes. (For context, the Iraq war, which ended up lasting years, cost about $5.8 trillion.) That figure doesn’t include externalities like the global energy crisis, but it’s certainly in keeping with Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought’s request for a staggering $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon to be included in the Trump administration’s 2027 budget, a 50 percent increase over the previous year. Vought claims that this added expense would be recouped by eliminating “fraud” and, of course, a cut in non-defense spending—on the order of ten percent.
It is obvious by now that Republicans have no interest in reducing the deficit, despite often campaigning on “fiscal responsibility.” Nor do they have any intention of helping ordinary Americans fight the rising cost of living, exacerbated by Trump’s tariffs and the surge in gas prices caused by the Iran war.
Imagine what we could pay for instead of an unnecessary and massively destructive war. Forgoing just two weeks of strikes in Iran could, according to reporter Nik Popli of Time, fully fund the following: health care for 1.3 million Americans, full food assistance for 5.5 million, housing assistance for 1 million, the National Park Service, pre-K for nine hundred thousand children, Pell grants for 1.5 million students, and the salaries of more than one hundred thousand teachers and nurses.
An unpopular war combined with an affordability crisis may explain why so many Republicans in Congress are either retiring or refusing to appear at town halls in red states. They blame inflation on Joe Biden and insist that the economic hardships borne by working people in their districts are merely “temporary.” Meanwhile rural hospitals and daycare centers are closing in states all across the country.
Massive spikes in health-insurance premiums, often on the order of several thousand dollars per month, mean that millions of Americans will go without care in 2027—including an estimated 5.3 million who depend on Medicaid. As Vought explained to the House budget committee, the fact that 15 million Americans are set to lose their health care in coming years is actually one of the Trump administration’s proudest achievements: those recipients, he claimed, were either illegal immigrants or poor Americans defrauding the system. Besides, Vought continued, “able-bodied” Americans who lose their health insurance because of the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act will be free to return to the workforce and receive the “benefit” of a job with an employer-sponsored plan.
Budgets are boring, which is why most Americans, burdened as they are with their taxes and medical bills, with paying for child care, groceries, and transportation, usually don’t pay attention to how they’re made. But budgets, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, are also moral documents. They reveal a nation’s priorities. What this budget proposal reveals is a scandalous disregard not only for people who experience any kind of material hardship but for anyone who isn’t rich.
Not long after Trump’s infamous Truth Social rant about the pope, Leo told an audience in Cameroon that “the masters of war pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy, yet a lifetime is often not enough to rebuild. They turn a blind eye to the fact that billions of dollars are spent on killing and devastation, yet the resources needed for healing, education, and restoration are nowhere to be found.”
The pope later insisted that he was not referring to anyone in particular. And it’s true, unfortunately, that Leo’s description of what the “masters of war” are up to applies to several world leaders. But Trump and his supporters have good reason to take it personally. A man who promised to be “the peace president” has revealed himself to be an unabashed if incompetent warmonger, threatening to take Iranians “back to the Stone Age, where they belong,” while also hinting at the prospect of new military adventures in Cuba and Greenland. And to pay for all this, he and his party are willing to immiserate millions of vulnerable Americans, including many who voted for him. If the pope did not name names, it was at least partly because he didn’t have to.
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