ALWAYS MONEY TO KILL THEIR CHILDREN. NEVER ENOUGH TO PROTECT OURS.

Donald Trump actually said this out loud.

“The United States can’t take care of day care,” he declared. “We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care.”

He didn’t stop there.

“Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things … You can’t do it,” Trump added. “We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”

There it is. The entire Republican worldview distilled into one grotesque little sermon: America is supposedly too poor to help sick people, struggling parents, disabled children, or the elderly, but somehow endlessly rich when Lockheed Martin sends an invoice.

And notice the language. Child care and health care are spoken about like irritating luxuries, little annoyances cluttering the federal budget between missile strikes and military parades. Not necessities. Not human needs. Certainly not rights.

This is a man who spent years golfing at taxpayer expense, handing tax cuts to billionaires, exploding the deficit, and funneling public money upward. Now he’s lecturing ordinary Americans that the country simply “can’t” afford to keep them alive because “we’re fighting wars.”

The obscenity is not just the cruelty. It’s the smallness of the vision.

Imagine presiding over the richest empire in modern history and concluding that American parents paying more for daycare than college tuition is totally fine. Imagine watching millions rely on Medicaid for chemotherapy, insulin, nursing care, or survival itself, and deciding the real national emergency is making sure the Pentagon never has to tighten its belt by a single dollar.

And perhaps the most pathetic part is that Trump says these things with the swagger of a strongman while essentially arguing that the United States is too weak, too broke, and too incompetent to do what nearly every other advanced democracy already manages routinely.

In Trump’s America, there is always enough money to destroy things.

Helping Americans live? Suddenly that’s unrealistic. ∎

➥ Subscribe for free: Open Letters by Mersault