Trump To Put His Name On Seniors' Cat Food After He Guts Medicare To Give Pete Hegseth $1.5T In Splodey Things

It's going to be a long war.

How many times in the past month has the world heard from blubbering dingo carcass Donald Trump that the United States has all but wiped out Iran’s military? It has been his constant refrain almost from the moment the bombs first dropped a long five weeks ago. Iran’s entire air force and navy have been “successfully knocked out.” (March 3) Iran’s military had been “decimated.” (March 12) Just this past Wednesday, in a speech that sourly punctuated the end of many, many otherwise-enjoyable Seders, Trump told the world that Iran’s “ability to launch missiles and drones is dramatically curtailed.” The Pentagon estimated publicly that 90 percent of Iran’s missile capacity was “degraded or destroyed,” and 70 percent of its missile launchers have been “neutralized.”

There is one tiny problem with all this gleeful braggadocio, which is that sources in the intelligence community went running to CNN to let the public know that those missile numbers are a bunch of bullshit. According to this new report, Iran still has about half of its missile launchers intact, along with about 50 percent of its “drone capabilities,” which is another way of saying “one-way suicide drones laden with explosives that can take out an oil refinery.” That amounts to thousands of drones. One source told CNN that Iran is “still very much poised to wreak absolute havoc throughout the entire region.”

Hm, it sounds as if the president’s promise that the US can wind down operations in two to three weeks might be — hang on to your hats — bullshit. Donald Trump, the kitchen contractor of presidents:

“We can keep f**king them up, I don’t doubt it, but you’re out of your mind if you think this will be done in two weeks,” the source said.

Don’t tell us, tell the rapidly dissociating brain in the Oval Office, if you can slip it into one of those video mashups of Iranian stuff ‘splodin that allegedly make up most of his briefings and may be giving him an overly rosy view of where things stand.

Why hasn’t the US knocked out more missile launchers? Well, the Iranians have countered our attempts to find them with the highly technical military strategy of hiding them in caves, making them much more difficult for us to find in the first place.

Boy, are we glad we’re glad we are paring down the nation’s weapons reserves by firing them at Iran at a rate people in the Pentagon have allegedly described as “alarming.” It’s totally worth it to not meet our ill-defined objectives in the first place.

It is ironic that this is all coming out the very same week that the White House put out its annual budget request for the military. And wouldn’t you know it, Trump wants another, extra, half a trillion dollars in spending, from roughly $1 trillion in 2026 to $1.5 trillion in 2027. Hey, we’ve got a lot of Tomahawk missiles to replace!

What will America be getting with this increased military spending besides replenishing the weapons stocks we are wasting in a useless war in the Mideast? (Again?) Well, we’re getting an investment of $17.5 billion in the “Golden Dome” missile defense system. That’s the system that is supposed to protect North America from ballistic and hypersonic missiles that might be fired at us from our enemies. Golden Dome relies on space-based data centers run by an AI network, an idea that proponents think is super cool and skeptics think sounds like a multi-trillion-dollar boondoggle that will at least replace Reagan’s Star Wars system from the 1980s as the dumbest missile defense idea this nation has ever cooked up. So there’s that.

The budget request also includes this:

Oh boy, the Golden Fleet, that series of what Trump calls “battleships” and everyone else calls “some sort of surface warfare boat that is not a battleship, more like a destroyer, but Trump is, like a four-year-old, entranced by the idea of big naval guns going boom.”

As it happens, we wrote about this crafts project the White House dementia ward has given President Neurological Infarction to keep him occupied back in December. The government had just announced the project, which Trump claimed would include a boat that is “the fastest, the biggest, and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built.”

Trump also claimed to have a hand in the design of the ship, because he’s “a very aesthetic person.” Then he released renderings of the proposed super-boat that looked like someone had typed “navy ship that looks like a Lego kit built with bricks taken from kits of other, actually popular and useful Lego kits.”

If — and it’s a big if — these boats get built, they will not sail until sometime in the 2030s. But they haven’t actually been designed yet, Trump’s silly “kids on The Simpsons designing Funzo”-level images notwithstanding.

White House Dementia Care Unit Tells Trump He’s Designing A Great Big Boat!

Meanwhile, the president proposes to pay for all this by slashing non-defense spending by roughly 10 percent, or about $73 billion, next year. This would include stuff no American needs, such as, uh, healthcare, airport security, and whatever other bugaboos pass through the howling void between Trump’s ears:

“The United States can’t take care of daycare — that has to be up to a state,” the president said on Wednesday. “We can’t take care of daycare, we’re a big country. We have 50 states, we have all these other people, we’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare.”

But don’t we need daycare to make sure all these kids grow up so we can funnel them into the military to fight all these wars? Sometimes we suspect Trump doesn’t think about the bigger picture. Who does he think is going to sail all his cool Lego battleships sometime in the next 20-30 years?

Oh, and also:

“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things," Trump said during the speech. "They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”

Medicaid, Medicare, who needs ‘em? Not the guy who’s suing the IRS for $10 billion in American dollars because just kidding, there’s no reason. He wants to, okay? Pay the man.

The budget request document released by the White House, in a break from the past, reportedly doesn’t include deficit projections for Congress to consider while it is debating how much of Trump’s wishes to fulfill. That’s because this is all expensive as shit, and even the Trump administration isn’t dumb enough to announce they are going to blow up the deficit and debt even further, by who knows how many trillions, for a huge military buildup at the expense of stuff like public schools and public health. And Medicare.

We strongly encourage Trump to campaign for the midterms on this message of “huge military spending increases while cutting anything that would keep people fed and healthy in the near term.” The potential blowout of Republicans in November could always be bigger.

[CNN / CBS]

Trump left Wonkette out of his budget request, so we hope our loyal readers will help us keep the lights on.