Tag: donald trump

Trump Set To Unveil His $1.5 Trillion Military Budget Request Amid Raging Iran War

President Trump is expected to unveil his request for a $1.5 trillion military budget for the 2027 fiscal year on Friday, Reuters has reported, marking a 50% increase from this year’s already massive budget.

The 2026 military budget marked the first to officially exceed $1 trillion, which was achieved by Congress passing a 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) worth about $900 billion and combining it with $150 billion in supplemental military spending that was included in the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, a reconciliation bill that became law last year.

The White House is expected to go with a similar strategy to reach $1.5 trillion. It may request an NDAA worth about $1 trillion or less and seek a supplemental spending bill for $400 to $600 billion. Republican leadership in Congress has already begun working on the potential supplemental.

The Trump administration is also expected to soon ask Congress for $200 billion in “emergency” spending for the Iran war, mainly to replenish the air defense munitions and missiles used so far in the conflict, which has been raging for more than one month. It’s unclear if the $200 billion for the Iran war would be in addition to the supplemental for the 2027 budget.

The Reuters report said that the massive $1.5 trillion request will include the $185 billion “Golden Dome” project, Trump’s plan for a major new missile defense system for all the territory of the United States, which will be a major boondoggle for the US weapons makers and may spark a new arms race.

The report said the administration also plans to use the money to fund more weapons production with the goal of “deterring” China and to replenish weapons used in the Middle East wars and in Ukraine.

Bloomberg reported that the White House’s budget plan will frame the Republicans’ midterm election message around a massive military buildup, partially paid for by cuts to domestic agencies. The request will come as the US appears to be on the cusp of launching ground operations against Iranian islands and ports, which could lead to significant US casualties.

At the beginning of his term, Trump suggested he was interested in reducing the military budget, but he then dramatically expanded US military interventions worldwide and sought record-breaking spending levels.

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Trump has no good options to resolve the disaster he created in Iran

U.S. President Donald Trump addressed the American public on Wednesday, but he didn’t have anything new to say. That lack of any substance is emblematic of the entire criminal and foolish war he agreed to launch on Iran.

The American war effort is a disaster. While the United States and Israel have inflicted enormous damage on Iran and killed and injured thousands of innocent civilians both there and in Lebanon, the actual gains are minimal, and to the extent that there were any goals for this war, they haven’t been achieved.

When Trump announced that he would speak Wednesday night, many thought he was going to announce a timetable for an American departure from this war, but all we got was more of the same “four weeks” guesswork that we heard four weeks ago. 

The only item that was even a little different, although Trump has been alluding to it for several days, is that the U.S. might leave the war without a deal to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz. 

Doing that would make American losses in this war even more dramatic. But Trump has allowed himself to be led into a war with no way out. 

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Trump says workers must pay for imperialist war with cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and daycare

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.

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The Strange Case Of Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’

On January 22, 2026, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Donald Trump signed the Charter of the Board of Peace before a room of world leaders, cameras, and a step-and-repeat backdrop plastered floor to ceiling with a repeating pattern that should have stopped every journalist in the room cold.¹

It was not the Board of Peace’s own logo. The BoP has its own emblem — a gold shield containing a globe centered on the Western Hemisphere, flanked by laurel branches, displayed prominently at the top of the stage. But the surface behind the signing table, the one that would fill every wire service photograph transmitted around the world, displayed the Great Seal of the United States: the eagle with spread wings, shield on breast, olive branch and arrows in its talons, stars above. Unmistakable. Incontestable.

The problem is that the Board of Peace charter explicitly states that Trump’s chairmanship “is independent of his presidency of the United States.”² The entire legal justification for bypassing Congress rests on the Board being a private international body — not a U.S. government instrument.

Under 18 U.S.C. § 713(a), displaying the Great Seal in connection with any public meeting in a manner reasonably calculated to convey a false impression of U.S. government sponsorship is a federal criminal offense.³ The Board cannot simultaneously claim independence from the U.S. government and wrap itself in that government’s sovereign seal. That is not a technicality. That is the architecture of deception.

Article 13.3 of the charter states that the Board “will have an official seal, which shall be approved by the Chairman.”⁴ If Trump approved the Great Seal of the United States as the Board of Peace’s official backdrop at its founding ceremony, that fact alone warrants a full accounting.

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Trump White House plagiarized Iran war manifesto from Israel-aligned think tank

The Trump White House plagiarized its justification for attacking Iran from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the main DC outfit promoting war with Tehran. The think tank was originally founded to “enhance Israel’s image,” and partners closely with the Israeli government.

The Trump Administration appeared to plagiarize its official justification for its war on Iran, copying almost word-for-word a document originally produced by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a pro-war think tank with close ties to Israeli intelligence which was originally founded to “enhance Israel’s image.”

The FDD document was authored by Tzvi Kahn, the former assistant director for policy and government affairs at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

A March 2, 2026 statement issued by the White House accusing Tehran of 44 instances of terrorism against American citizens is “virtually identical” to the list published by FDD in June 2025, analyst Stephen McIntyre noted Thursday.

While the White House did make superficial alterations to the text, they largely consisted of appending the label “Iran-backed” to every mention of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. In the few instances where Trump administration officials bothered to make significant changes to the original FDD list, the edits were almost always made in service of “ratcheting up the underlying allegation,” McIntyre concluded.

Among the most egregious examples was a 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which FDD originally said merely that Hezbollah al-Hejaz was “deemed responsible” for. In the White House version, however, the group’s responsibility was “asserted as factual,” explained McIntyre, noting that serious questions about the incident remain unanswered to this day. “Clinton’s Defense Secretary William Perry subsequently wondered (along with many others) whether Khobar Towers should have been attributed to Al Qaeda,” he wrote.

A 2009 investigation by journalist Gareth Porter based on interviews with over a dozen former CIA, FBI and Clinton administration officials demonstrated that the FBI’s inquiry into the Khobar Towers attack was precooked to blame Iran, when Al Qaeda was most likely the culprit. Porter found that Shia citizens of Saudi Arabia had been tortured into confessing to the crime by Saudi secret police.

While the White House declined to join FDD in blaming Iran for the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, it echoed the Israel-oriented organization in blaming Tehran for 603 military deaths in Iraq, which both documents attributed to “Iran-backed militias.” But there are major discrepancies with the figure, which amounts to 60% of the total US combatant deaths attributed to Iran. As McIntyre noted, such a claim is “not made in the State Department annual reports on Global Terrorism.”

At least four of the Americans the Trump administration claims were killed by Iran had served in Israel’s military. These included a US citizen who died while invading Lebanon in 2006 and two Americans in the IDF’s Golani brigade who were killed while invading Gaza in 2014. The fourth American, who was born in Israel and had also served in the Golani brigade, was killed amid violent reprisals against settlers in the West Bank in 2015.

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Left Wing Group ‘Demand Justice’ Panicked Over Possibility That Trump Will Get to Pick Two More Supreme Court Justices

The progressive activist group ‘Demand Justice’ is already warning their fellow travelers on the left that President Trump may be able to pick two more new justices for the U.S. Supreme Court before leaving office.

If you remember the ordeal that the left put the country through when Justice Kavanaugh was being confirmed, you have an idea of what the left would do if Trump got to pick not one, but two more judges for the court. The term ‘meltdown’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.

It would be funny though, especially after all of the left’s talk about packing the court.

This is from the New York Times:

Liberal Group Warns That Trump Could Have Two More Supreme Court Picks

For now, none of the nine Supreme Court justices have announced plans to retire, and Mr. Trump has no looming opportunity to keep stocking the court with younger conservative justices.

That isn’t stopping Demand Justice from preparing a multimillion-dollar effort to oppose potential Trump Supreme Court appointees before they happen — with a warning that Mr. Trump could be replacing two justices this year…

Josh Orton, the president of Demand Justice, said the project would cost $3 million to start and $15 million more if vacancies occurred and Mr. Trump nominated a successor to the court — most likely for Clarence Thomas or Samuel A. Alito Jr., the two oldest justices. Justice Thomas is 77 years old, and Justice Alito is 76…

“If you think that Trump is willing to leave two of the three justices he thinks are most loyal on the court in their 80s past when he leaves office, you are not paying attention,” Mr. Orton said in an interview Thursday. “There is no way that Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito would ever commit the fundamental miscalculation about power that we saw from Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Barack Obama and we as a movement.”

Now that it has been revealed that Justice Alito had a recent health scare, people on the left are probably even more nervous.

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Trump’s Tone-Deaf Sales Pitch for More War

The President’s address to the nation was a tone-deaf sales pitch for more war, delivered on the first night of Passover.

Civilian and military casualties are mounting across the region. Lives are being extinguished while triumphalist and violent rhetoric is offered as justification. War is being escalated in the name of peace, a contradiction that demands moral clarity, not political acceptance.

Each life lost carries equal value. No nation’s suffering is expendable. No people exist as collateral.

Iran is not an abstraction, nor just a target on a map. It is one of the great cradles of civilization, a society whose cultural and intellectual contributions long predate the rise of the modern West. To speak casually of bombing such a nation ‘back to the Stone Age’ reveals a colonial mindset that dehumanizes others and diminishes our own humanity in the process.

The extensive bombing of Iran by the United States and Israel, along with Iran’s counterstrikes, is already taking innocent lives. The global economy is destabilizing as a result.

Energy markets are being disrupted. Oil and gas production is constrained. Fertilizer supply chains are impaired. Critical materials are being cut off.

These consequences will be felt worldwide. Yet the deeper crisis is not economic, it is moral.

We have seen this before. The repeated invocation of a nuclear threat echoes the false claims of ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ used to justify the invasion of Iraq. That war cost thousands of American lives, the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and trillions of dollars, while leaving a legacy of instability and grief that endures to this day.

If the President truly sought to prevent a nuclear Iran, he would not have abandoned the JCPOA, an agreement that placed verifiable limits on Iran’s nuclear program. Instead, we are presented with a cycle of escalation that defies logic and invites catastrophe.

Political rhetoric is becoming increasingly radical and dangerous. This is not a question of partisan politics. It is a question of conscience with very real global and domestic consequences.

The American people are not called to accept this. They are called to stand against it.

Members of Congress must have the courage to exercise their constitutional authority and rein this in.

War framed as strength is destruction. Violence presented as necessity is gratuitous violence, with consequences already accelerating destabilizing shifts in the global order.

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US stock markets fall, oil soars as Trump promises to bomb Iran ‘back to the stone age’

The value of US stock markets fell, while the price of oil soared in early trading on 2 April following US President Donald Trump’s speech in which he vowed to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age.”

The president said on Wednesday evening from the White House that the US would continue its bombing campaign on Iran “until our objectives are fully achieved,” suggesting the war will last longer than expected.

“I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly. We’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks – we’re going to bring them back to the Stone Age, where they belong,” Trump vowed.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell some 1.3 percent when the US stock market opened the following morning. The S&P 500 index was also down 1.3 percent, while the Nasdaq composite was down 1.7 percent. Much of the losses were recovered over the course of the trading day.

Oil prices rose sharply and remained high throughout the day. The price of US crude rose to $113 – a 13 percent gain.

Brent crude, the international baseline, rose more than eight percent, to $109 per barrel.

US stock markets rallied, and the price of oil fell to start the week, after Trump stated on Sunday he was having “serious discussions” with a “new and more reasonable regime in Tehran.”

But the price of oil has risen following Trump’s remarks, which underscored that the war will not end soon and the Strait of Hormuz will remain closed indefinitely.

Since the US and Israel launched a war on Iran on 28 February, the strategic waterway has effectively remained closed due to the threat of Iranian attacks and soaring insurance premiums for vessels wishing to transit it.

Energy prices have since skyrocketed, as Gulf oil exports through the strait have ground to a halt.

During his Wednesday address, Trump expressed no urgency in opening Hormuz, instead criticizing European nations suffering from fuel shortages for refusing to send their own warships to reopen it.

“To those countries that can’t get fuel – many of which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, we had to do it ourselves – I have a suggestion,” he said.

“Number one, buy oil from the United States of America; we have plenty. We have so much. And number two, build up some delayed courage … Go to the strait and just take it. Protect it. Use it for yourselves. Iran has been essentially decimated. The hard part is done.”

Trump claimed that Hormuz would likely “just open up naturally” at the close of the war.

He called rising gas prices in the US a “short-term” matter, while claiming “the United States has never been better prepared economically to confront this threat.”

Regarding Trump’s threats, Esmail Baghaei, spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, said Thursday that Tehran has “no choice but to fight back strongly.”

“We will not tolerate this vicious cycle of war, negotiations, ceasefire, and then repeating the same pattern,” he said in a statement reported by state media. “This is catastrophic not only for Iran, but for the entire region and beyond.”

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Golden Dome, ships and missiles top Trump’s $1.9 trillion fiscal 2027 defence wish list  

US President Donald Trump is set to unveil a US$1.5 trillion (S$1.9 trillion) defence budget request for the next fiscal year on April 3, by far the largest year-over-year increase in defence spending in the post-World War II era.

Funding for Mr Trump’s marquee but controversial US$185 billion “Golden Dome” missile defence shield is expected to be included in the budget request, as well as Lockheed Martin F-35 jets and warships.

Procurement of Virginia-class submarines made by General Dynamics, and Huntington Ingalls Industries as well as other top shipbuilding priorities is expected.

In 2025, Mr Trump asked Congress for a national defence budget of US$892.6 billion then added US$150 billion through a supplemental budget request, sending the total price tag over US$1 trillion for the first time in history.

While the budget request framework for the fiscal year ending Sept 30, 2027, is set to be unveiled on April 3, a Pentagon official said more details on the defence budget will be announced on April 21.

Earlier this year the administration was contemplating whether the US$1.5 trillion budget request could be in the form of a US$900 billion national security budget, with a US$400 billion to US$600 billion additional request, similar to the structure used in 2026.

The administration plans to use funds for more weapons production in the hopes of deterring Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific region and to rebuild weapons stocks depleted by conflicts in Israel, Iran and Ukraine.

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Statue of Trump and Jeffrey Epstein holding hands is removed from the National Mall

U.S. Park Police said Wednesday they’ve removed statues from the National Mall that depicted President Donald Trump and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein holding hands and skipping.

The artwork, entitled “Best Friends Forever,” was installed near the Capitol on Tuesday morning and quickly became a tourist attraction.

“In honor of friendship month, we celebrate the long-standing bond between President Donald J. Trump and his closest friend Jeffrey Epstein,” a plaque between the two statues read.

Other plaques under the figures made reference to the text of a racy 50th birthday note that was sent to Epstein using Trump’s name in 2003. Trump has denied sending or being involved with such a card, and filed a $10 billion defamation suit against The Wall Street Journal for reporting on its existence.

A note matching the Journal’s description was turned over to the House Oversight Committee earlier this month, and the paper’s publisher argued in a court filing this week the suit should be dismissed because the article is accurate.

A group calling itself “The Secret Handshake” claimed credit for the artwork in a statement to the Independent, and said it had a permit for the statues.

Elizabeth Peace, a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior, said in a statement, “The statue was removed because it was not compliant with the permit issued.”

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