Donald Trump Wants To Eliminate the Whole Government Except the Pentagon

And he's too gaga even to know it.

You-know-who.

Donald Trump is getting a lot of attention for the incoherent parts of his economics speech yesterday, especially the gibberish he spouted about child care. But the coherent parts were even worse. Bloomberg’s Eric Wasson and Enda Curran added up all the tax cuts that Trump and Vance have talked up on the stump and found they would cost $10.5 trillion over a decade. And that’s a lowball, because it doesn’t include a couple of Project 2025 tax proposals, one of which Trump endorsed during his presidency, that would cost even more. When you consider this and subtract revenues from an across-the-board 10 percent tariff on foreign goods ($2.8 trillion), keeping in mind the dampening of economic activity the tariff would cause, plus the payments it would require to compensate American farmers … well, it pretty much all comes out in the wash, leaving $10.5 trillion a reasonable estimate.

If you further presume (rashly) that Trump intends to pay for these tax cuts, Wasson and Curran observe, and if you further presume Trump would keep his promise not to cut Medicare and Social Security and to increase Pentagon spending, the result is that Trump would have to eliminate every agency of the federal government except the Pentagon. Trump would also have to figure out how to get those Medicare reimbursements and Social Security payments out without government officials to supervise them. Oh, and he’d still have a $700 billion shortfall. Elon Musk, Trump said, will chair a commission to weed out wasteful spending, but it’s doubtful that every penny of government spending excepting defense, Social Security, and Medicare is wasteful.

This is the subject of my latest New Republic column. You can read it here.