A few weeks ago, the United States Department of Defense informed Congress that the first six days of the war in Iran cost $11.3 billion. On the first of those six days, the U.S. destroyed the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab. It was a horrible act, an actual atrocity, and it underlines the utter lack of a moral justification for the conflict. I would like to think that most Americans would willingly plant a victory garden, ration gas, or make other cuts necessary to put a stop to the kind of aggressive country that would perpetrate such an act. The sad truth is that it was us. We did it, and we will pay for it, as well as the rest of the conflict, if President Donald Trump’s 2027 budget comes to pass.
“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things. They can do it on a state basis; we can’t do it on a federal basis. We have to take care of one thing: military protection,” Trump said in a video, some days before he sent his 2027 budget to Congress. “We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.” He stuck to that course when he directed Congress to cut $73 billion in the 2027 budget.
Anyway, for no reason whatsoever, this feels like the right time to repeat that it took less than a week to spend $11.3 billion in Iran.
Trump wants to cut the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). He wants to cut WIC, which serves between 40 and 50 percent of all infants born in the United States. It’s like he’s The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns, but even more evil. Usually this sort of tirade would end with a sentence along the lines of, “What’s next, you literally take candy from a baby?” Except that he’s starting by taking food from kids.
Of course, saying that Trump wants to cut funds for vital programs is a little like assuming Mickey Mouse has a say in what goes on at Disney. I presume that the deranged mascot of an evil organization wants the same thing the company wants, but all that really matters is this: people with power want to stop spending our tax dollars on food for babies and children so they can spend it on war, and an unjust and unlawful one at that.
All this comes just days after Isabel Brown, a speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference, made news by saying that parents should encourage their children to get married and, “have kids, have more kids than they can afford, before they think they’re ready.” The messaging is cruel and contradictory: “It is your patriotic duty to ‘marry and procreate,’ but we can’t afford to help feed or house or educate them.”
Now might be a good time to note that the funding for all of this, whether Tomahawk missiles or school lunches, comes from us. It’s ours, the money for war — or for grants for preschools, K-12 funding, Section 8 housing, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Small Business Administration, if that’s what you’re into. We are, in fact, allowed to invest in ourselves and our futures, no matter what John Wayne’s ghost whispers about big guns and good ol’ American values.
In his famous 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism,” Umberto Eco says that fascism is a breed of totalitarianism, “a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.” The doublespeak, the mental gymnastics, the simultaneous holding of contradictory ideas — I understand those are features, not bugs, in the ideology of fascism. Even so, who can believe that a nation is on the right side of history when it refuses to take care of its children and its sick, targets elementary schools, and threatens, as Trump did, the imminent death of an entire civilization?
Way back in 2018, Trump referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and countries on the African continent as “shithole” countries. What exactly would you call a country that chooses not to prioritize the wellbeing of its citizens? What are we if our leaders admit we cannot even afford to tackle such basic problems as healthcare and education?
Jesse Davis is a former Flyer staffer; he writes a monthly Books feature for Memphis Magazine. His opinions, such as they are, include the previously normal belief that feeding and educating children is good, actually, if you don’t want a nation composed primarily of malnourished, traumatized imbeciles.