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Politics

Trump's Vision for Government Includes Lots of Guns and Little Compassion

In his first address to Congress, Trump made clear that he would be prioritizing the military and law enforcement—and scaling back nearly every other function of government.
Photo by Jim Lo Scalzo - Pool/Getty Images

Tuesday night, Donald Trump stood before Congress and delivered a speech that, by his low standards, was presidential as hell. He didn't talk about his dick or restart his feud with Rosie O'Donnell—he even opened the address by referencing Black History Month and denouncing the recent wave of anti-Semitic bomb threats and the racist shooting of two Indian men in Kansas. Trump and his speechwriters decided that rather than doubling down on the "American carnage" grimness of his inaugural, it'd be more media-friendly to talk about dreams and jobs and veterans, the anodyne stuff of public political discourse.

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So yes, Trump read the speech well. He told Americans to "seize this moment and believe in yourselves, believe in your future." But if you put all the hopey-changey stuff to one side and focus on the policy prescriptions Trump made in the speech and that his administration has put forth in the past week, the picture is stark. When Trump says he'll make America great again, he means he'll give more money to the military, restrict immigration (including legal immigration), crack down on drugs (including legalized weed), and defer more to cops and prosecutors. The police will not be policed. The government will not fight to keep the air and water clean, or alleviate the effects of climate change. Corporations will be left to do what they will. Those who gained access to health insurance through the Affordable Care Act may have their insurance taken away. It's small government, in other words, except when it comes to men with guns.

The theme of the speech was that Americans have "watched our middle class shrink as we've exported our jobs and wealth to foreign countries," that the US has supported globalism at the expense of its own citizens, that the country's infrastructure has withered and its economy has failed many people. The "families of all colors and creeds" who voted him into office, Trump said, "just wanted a fair shot for their children and a fair hearing for their concerns."

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This was a sort of retconning of Trump's presidential campaign, a coherent ideology that he wasn't quite able to articulate when he announced his candidacy nearly two years ago by rambling about China and Mexico and rapists. But it makes sense, as a diagnosis of the economic misery inflicted on the towns and counties that delivered Trump to the White House.

So, what will Trump do for those towns and counties?

Mostly the answer seems to be slashing "job-crushing regulations" and reducing taxes on corporations—standard Republican fare. Trump also spoke about imposing taxes on foreign companies, making life easier for American businesses. The idea is that these policies will trickle down to the workers and the unemployed—lower taxes mean companies can hire more employees and pay them better, less foreign competition means more American firms will stay in business.

But Trump has never indicated that he'll help workers directly. He does not appear interested in raising the minimum wage; his administration seems downright hostile to unions.

Instead, Trump framed his crackdown on illegal immigration efforts as a way to "raise wages, help the unemployed, save billions of dollars, and make our communities safer for everyone." The idea that immigrants take jobs is disputed, but even if we accept Trump's positioning of immigration as a purely economic issue, it's striking that this is how Trump wants to lift up workers—not by protecting or expanding their wages and benefits, but by tearing down their presumed competition.

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Trump promised—again—to build that wall. He announced the creation of a new DHS agency called VOICE: Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement; its sole purpose will be to publicize the crimes of immigrants—already a hobbyhorse for many conservative-media outlets. Immigration authorities have already begun aggressively detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants, even those who have not committed crimes while in the US, targeting restaurants and even church shelters.

For every problem, Trump has a solution, and the solution is the same: More militarization, harsher penalties, and more authority for cops. On Tuesday, he decried a drug trade that was "poisoning our youth," but while he did promise expanded treatment, his attorney general Jeff Sessions is gearing up for an expansion of the war on drugs—which could even target legal weed businesses. Trump denounced the poverty and violence affecting American inner cities, particularly Chicago, but he doesn't seem to care about policing abuses that often plague those communities. The president said Americans should "work with—not against—the men and women of law enforcement" and denounced "disunity and division." Meanwhile, Sessions has more or less dismissed reports on the terrors inflicted on Chicago and Ferguson by cops.

Even when he talked about infrastructure spending, one of the major ways Trump breaks from the GOP, he described roads and bridges as being "financed through both public and private capital"—presumably describing public-private partnerships that can go very wrong and don't represent a significant investment by government.

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Finally, Trump said he was calling for "one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history." It's a $54 billion increase, to be specific, which he has said he'll couple with equivalent cuts to other parts of government. Though Trump (and other Republicans) have complained that the military is weak, the US defense budget continues to dwarf that of other countries—and, of course, America is currently not involved in a major war.

Shrinking the size of government has long been a Republican goal, and one Trump agrees with—except when it comes the functions of government that involve arresting people, deporting immigrants, prosecuting drug users, or adding missiles and ships to America's massive arsenal.

"Think of the marvels we can achieve if we simply set free the dreams of our people," Trump said near the end of his speech. "Cures to illnesses that have always plagued us are not too much to hope. American footprints on distant worlds are not too big a dream."

It's a nice thought—but if Americans want to achieve those dreams, they'll have to do so by themselves. Despite Trump's nice words, it seems clear he's not going to help.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.