Esquire’s Charles Pierce is accusing President Trump of adding to something he vowed to subtract from. In a Thursday post, Pierce called the White House’s proposed federal budget a “vast, noxious swamp into which all those tributaries of modern conservative thought have emptied themselves. People die in there, swallowed up in deep sinkholes of empowered bigotry and class anger.”
Nonetheless, the ideology behind the budget doesn’t come from Trump. “Every year, during the run-up to Halloween, when Jim DeMint goes to Hell's mega-mall and sits on Satan's lap, he has a list of things he wants for the holiday,” wrote Pierce. “DeMint and the rest of the greasy barbarians at Heritage finally got most of what they asked for…This budget is short-sighted, cruel to the point of being sadistic, stupid to the point of pure philistinism, and shot through with the absolute and fundamentalist religious conviction that the only true functions of government are the ones that involve guns, and that the only true purpose of government is to serve the rich.”
Pierce expressed his irritation in the form of rhetorical questions:
Who in the hell zeroes out Meals on Wheels?...
Who in the hell zeroes out the NEA, or the NEH, or the CPB? Who decides that rural museums, and Ken Burns, and Antiques Roadshow are too elitist for a country full of righteous bumpkins?...
Who the hell eliminates research funding for the climate crisis in an age of mega-storms, and wildfires, and steadily vanishing coastlines? Who pulls the country out of the Paris Agreement? Who takes the United States of Goddamn America out of the fight against the biggest existential crisis the planet has faced since the asteroid landed near the Yucatan?...
Who the hell virtually defunds the goddamn State Department? The party that tolerates a Tea Party hack like Mick Mulvaney…Mulvaney didn't need the rise of Donald Trump to become a crackpot who would be marginalized in any sane democratic republic. He was always there on the fringes.
This budget, Pierce argued, “is the most vivid statement yet” of movement conservatism, and “if the country allows [conservatives] to step away from [Trump] and his budget -- the way they all stepped away from Gingrich when he became toxic, or Reagan when he became senile, or George W. Bush, when everything went wrong -- then the country does itself no good service. This budget isn't what they want. It's who they are…[They] really are the fcking [sic] mole people.”
