Taking food from the hungry while funding a pointlessly destructive war: the Donald Trump story
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America’s spending on the war in Iran will far outlast active combat. The U.S. government has already made contracts and other commitments to repair damaged bases, field counter-drone platforms, feed and shelter thousands of troops and replenish munitions.
Even if President Trump signs a deal ending the war tomorrow, we will harden bases in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, by reinforcing aircraft shelters, building blast walls around fuel and communications nodes, replacing destroyed satellite communications equipment and installing layered defense systems to defeat Iranian drones — the kind that killed six Americans in Kuwait. We will monitor for years Iran’s nuclear and missile programs and the Strait of Hormuz with carrier strike groups, destroyers and intelligence assets. Also, the U.S. military will have to replenish its munitions stockpiles: The war has burned through U.S. supplies of offensive missiles such as Tomahawks, used to strike Iranian ground targets, and defensive Patriot and THAAD interceptor systems, deployed to halt an onslaught of thousands of Iranian drones.
I worked for a decade in the Defense Department’s inspector general’s office, conducting oversight of the sorts of conflicts that the United States so often finds itself in — ones that are easy to start and hard to end, just like this one. The Pentagon calls wars such as these “overseas contingency operations,” a misnomer that hides their true nature: long, stubborn conflicts marked by changing objectives, cost overruns, fraud and waste. The risk is high that the public will not understand how much the Iran conflict will cost and that a lot of money will be wasted, either lining the pockets of fraudsters or paying for things that are marginal to the mission.
Congress should force the Trump administration to provide full, regular transparency on what it has signed up the nation to pay. And it needs to be clear with the American people how well the government is using the billions it is set to spend.
Don’t forget the upper-class tax cuts that mean that, like George W. Bush’s stupid Middle East war, this will be funded entirely by debt.
President Trump and his top officials have cast a sharp decrease in the number of food stamp recipients over the past year as evidence of economic progress and increasing self-sufficiency.
But the decline of more than three million participants since Mr. Trump took office to December 2025 is the result of some of the most consequential changes and the largest funding cut to the program since its inception.
Through legislation and regulatory tweaks over the past year, the administration and its allies in Congress have achieved a long-held conservative goal of shrinking the safety net, reshaping how the federal government defines need for low-income beneficiaries of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Among the alterations: who is eligible, who must work to receive benefits, how much beneficiaries will receive, what can be purchased, what grocery stores that accept SNAP must stock on shelves, how states and counties administer the program and how much localities are paid by the federal government.
Trump is a Different Kind of Republican, insofar as he’s even more dogmatically committed ot Reaganism than Reagan (who during his second term signed a progressive tax reform bill) was.