Speaking at a closed Easter lunch at the White House on Wednesday, US President Donald Trump declared that the federal government should stop paying for daycare, Medicare and Medicaid, all of which, he indicated, must be sacrificed for imperialist war.
“Don’t send any money for daycare,” Trump said, because “we’re fighting wars.” He went on, “You gotta let states take care of daycare and they should pay for it too … Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,” insisting that Washington had to concern itself with only “one thing, military protection.”
He added that the federal government’s role was to “guard the country,” before dismissing Social Security, which serves more than 70 million people; Medicare, which covers about 68 million; and Medicaid and CHIP (the Children’s Health Insurance Program), which together cover more than 75 million people, including about 36 million children, as “little scams.”
The remarks, delivered in a setting where Trump evidently felt free to speak more openly than usual, were a blunt threat against programs on which millions of workers and their family members depend. Capitalist politicians generally avoid such direct attacks on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security because these programs remain deeply embedded in the lives of working people who have paid into them for decades. Trump, however, stated with unusual candor the real priorities of the ruling class.
The significance of the remarks lies not only in their content but in the circumstances under which they were made. The Easter lunch was closed to the press, and video of the event was briefly posted by the White House and then deleted. In contrast to Trump’s later scripted primetime address on Iran, the lunch exposed a more direct statement of policy: Social spending is to be gutted, while war spending is treated as the only indispensable function of the state.
Hellbound and Down 