By Their Budgets You Shall Know Them

Trump released his budget proposal that elicited praise from other psychopaths and gasps of horror from normal people, proving that Trump/ism remains as reliable a test of a person’s character as it ever was. It is frighteningly easy, for better and for worse, to tell who is conscience-deficient, and usually in what ways, by knowing where folks stand on matters Trump.

Here’s one useful visual of the proposed changes (not included in this “skinny budget” are health care programs and Social Security):

Trump's budget doesn't put America First. It will leave many many Americans behind. https://t.co/jSn5RaOEtr—
  (@igorvolsky) March 16, 2017

Unveiling of this proposal was followed yesterday by an appearance, during a press conference with Melissa Sean “Steely Smile” Spicer, of Mike Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), who explained what’s what.

If you didn’t watch it, you may want to, since it is notable for several interesting occurrences. Among them was Mulvaney explaining that food programs for hungry children and seniors will be slashed because they do not bring desired results.

When asked by incredulous journalists just what exactly such results should be, Mulvaney repeatedly emphasised that denying food to poor seniors was “a compassionate thing to do” because it stopped wasting  money. Same thing with depriving hungry kids of their government rations, although here he gave an explanation of the missing results. Turns out, as he said, that feeding poor kids does not appear to improve their academic performance. A waste of money then.

He may have a point there, I suppose. If Making America Great Again is about turning it into The Hunger Games (as suggested by yours truly on this very blog months ago, during our age of innocence), then it’s best to start the process of natural selection early.

Let the young ones from the slums learn to fend for themselves as soon as possible — they don’t need education anyway, that’s for the kids of rich people — so we can cull the herd to retain the strongest specimens, most able to serve as soldiers in the bloated military that Our Leader is preparing for his many war adventures. Let them eat bootstraps if that’s what it takes.

And those who have a misfortune to nevertheless survive being a cannon fodder and grow old(er) will be eliminated by the lack of health care. If that doesn’t work, we’ll starve them. See? The GOPers have it all worked out. That’s what Paul Ryan calls “mercy.” And he too may be on to something, for death sooner rather than later will seem merciful in the Great Again America prepared for us by Trump&Co.

Let’s face it: the GOP’s vision of MAGA is a version of eugenics designed to eliminate the weak and undesirable members of society to make more room and a much pleasant atmosphere for the wealthy.

Robert Reich calls Trump’s budget “bonkers” and in his post An Orgy of Unnecessary Cruelty describing Trump’s presidential actions to date, he asks, twice:

Why is Trump doing this? He has no compelling justification. 

Not if you are a normal person. Because if you are a narcissistic psychopath who lacks a conscience and is driven by unbridled and sadistic (key word) grandiosity and a desire for power, which makes you see other people, at best, as objects of need- and wish-fulfillment (if you notice them at all), then this is exactly the kind of budget you’d create.

More from Reich on the budget’s specifics:

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