Trump said he cares about working people — but his new budget says otherwise

President Donald Trump’s proposed budget is a “betrayal” against the low-income Americans who propelled him back to the White House in 2024, a prominent journalist warned on Sunday.

“The message to everyday Americans is: beware,” wrote The Guardian's Eduardo Porter on Sunday. Earlier in the article Porter had pointed out that “to the average American, however, it must be hard to understand Trump’s budget proposal as anything but a betrayal. He won the presidency twice, largely by promising help for America’s beleaguered working stiffs, forever ignored by cosmopolitan elites in power, invested in foreign trade agreements and open borders policies. The budget proposal confirms that, if it ever was sincere, this commitment has by now been forgotten.”

Porter then proceeded to list examples: “the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) could see its budget cut by over $15bn, 12% less compared with this year,” for instance, on top of his so-called “big beautiful bill” cutting more than $1 trillion over 10 years from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, which is expected to “push 15 million Americans to lose health insurance, according to some analysts.”

In lieu of providing health care to ordinary citizens, Trump is instead focusing on his military and domestic law enforcement budgets. Porter cited the president’s big beautiful bill (BBB) to explain this.

“The BBB last year included $165bn for the Department of Homeland Security to ‘deliver on the President’s mandate to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens and make America safe again,’” Porter wrote. “Last week, he bet the house to pay for a bigger military. As he put it at an Easter lunch reception last week: ‘We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.’”

Porter added, “That is proving expensive. By some estimates, the Pentagon spent $12.7bn in the first six days and $28bn in a little over five weeks on the war against Iran, which appears to have next to nothing to do with guarding the country. His budget proposal, released last week, the one that cut the budget for HHS by 12% and the entire non-defense budget by 10%, was transparent about the Brobdingnagian sums Trump wants to spend on this kind of stuff: $1.5tn in 2027 alone. About three times Iran’s entire GDP and 42% more than the budget for 2026.”

Speaking with AlterNet last week, former Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley expressed alarm at how Trump’s fiscal policies will inevitably endanger funding for Social Security.

“Social Security is a pay as you go program,” O’Malley said. “It is not funded by deficit spending. It is more akin to an insurance company. People premiums and benefits are paid out from those premiums. Even the surplus — which because of income inequality is being depleted sooner (2032) than thought in 1983, even that was built up by payroll tax, not borrowed money. “

O’Malley then added, “An utter devaluation of the dollar — which Trump is causing and risking in so many reckless and self/serving ways (bitcoin), would be really bad for everything in US including Soc Sec, it is not true that Social Security depends on deficit spending for its support or benefits. (Except a small portion of admin expenses).”

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