The Club

America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again is the title of the federal budget draft that President Donald Trump released this past week.  The document itself reads like a blueprint to create a dystopian wasteland more fitting of a Mad Max movie than the United States.  Trump proposes eliminating a combined 62 agencies and programs targeting nearly everything that does, in fact, make America great including slashing programs to help the poor, gutting environmental protection, defunding scientific research initiatives, and ending support for the arts.

In Trump's America, the disadvantaged are on their own, clean drinking water is secondary to business profits, science is inconvenient, and art is defined by gold plating.  Trump does hold true to his promise of making government smaller but his budget does nothing to reduce overall spending particularly thanks to a $54 billion increase in military spending.  To hear Trump tell it in the preface message to Congress the country is under siege, "To keep Americans safe, we have made tough choices that have been put off for too long."

Everyone is for keeping the country safe.  Everyone is for American service personnel having the necessary tools to defend themselves and our interests.  However, Pearl Harbor wasn't bombed yesterday nor is the military the first line of defense against individual domestic terror attacks most widely cited as a major public concern.

Military might alone doesn't make a America great.  American is great when it shows not only strength but compassion. America is rich not only because of its wealth but because of the scientific and cultural achievements that wealth enables when it's directed toward the common good instead of the top one-percent.

Many Republicans have lost sight of the common good. Trump's budget unabashedly delivers on the double standard the GOP has long perpetuated. It's fine to cut public education because privileged Republicans send their children to exclusive private schools.  Public assistance is not a priority for the GOP except when it comes in the form of bailing out big banks pushed to the brink of failure by mismanagement and greed. Who needs museums when rich GOP collectors can just buy a Picasso?

Republican power brokers live in an exclusive club that anoints its members as the entitled - which is almost funny given how entitlement is a four letter word in the GOP public persona. It's less funny given the club's blind eye turned toward the hypocrisy it practices. Melania Trump doesn't want to leave her posh New York City digs in Trump Tower, fine, she's in the club; therefore, she's entitled, which makes the $200,000 spent daily on security to keep her there a justified expense. Compare that decision to her husband's proposal to ax the mere $3.5 million spent annually by the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness used to keep the non-entitled in their homes to illustrate the GOP double standard.

Not all Republicans believe the Trump budget to be a blueprint to make America great again. None of it can be enacted without congressional approval. The question is how many Republicans are willing to resign from the club to advocate for those things that truly do make America great. Given the GOP is currently tripping over itself trying to defend an indefensible health care bill and cannot even find the courage to call out Trump over his baseless wiretapping claims, it seems unlikely enough Republicans will find the conscience to actually put America first in the next federal budget. And that, to use a Trumpism, is sad.