The 47th President and the Post-Biden World 2.0

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have been thinking lately about taxes and war and citizens and what
the government should do for its people. In early March 1953, soon after Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower took office, Soviet leader Josef Stalin died, giving the president a chance to reset the rising militarization of the United States. In mid-April, in a speech to newspaper editors that he insisted on delivering although he was suffering acutely from inflammatory bowel disease, Eisenhower warned of diverting the nation’s tax dollars to war at the expense of the people.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said. “This world in arms is not spending money alone.

“It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”

“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense,” he said. “Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

In my opinion, Eisenhower understood the job of president better than any of the presidents who have served during my lifetime...and one-third of all the presidents who have ever served have served during my lifetime.

Eisenhower was right on the button here.

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“We had Hegseth in front of the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee and he couldn’t give us an accounting and wouldn’t give us an accounting. They still haven’t given us an accounting,” Morelle told Walker. “It’s unfathomable.”

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“The whole thing is alarming because, look…there’s finite resources. And the United States government needs to make decisions about where we’re gonna place our priorities, where we’re gonna invest our money,” Morelle explained. “If everything were just defense, we could argue about that number and that number alone, but every time you make a decision about increasing defense and security spending by $600 billion, which is a 60% increase virtually over last year, it means something else isn’t getting funded or alternatively, you’re borrowing more money.”

And think about this: According to our "president" and his lackey Hegseth, we are not using it for defense...we are using it for war. Supposedly this incompetent lackey is secretary of war...not secretary of defense. Apparently "defense" is not what we have in mind, but rather "war."

If he was serious, he would not be applying the same tariff rate to China, one of the worst forced labor abusers in the world, as he does to countries like Australia. Then again, unlike China, Australia, doesn’t manufacture any Trump corporation products.

Personally, I really like when Trump calls something an “illegal and highly unethical practice”.

When the Trump administration canceled more than $7.5 billion in Biden-era federal grants for clean energy projects in October, it framed the move as an urgent corrective to protect taxpayer funds from waste.

But it wasn’t true.

In little-noticed court documents, federal officials acknowledged this month that they had terminated the funding “based solely” on political criteria, targeting projects in states that were represented by Democrats and had voted for Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee, in the 2024 election.

The admission showed how President Trump has weaponized the provision of federal education, energy, health, housing and infrastructure aid in his second term. Far from rooting out the sort of misspending that Mr. Trump sees as rife in Washington, the White House has instead sought to leverage the budget as a tool to assist its allies — or as a cudgel to hurt the president’s foes.

The saga illustrates the stakes as the Trump administration is completing a set of rules that would provide the president even greater control over more than $1 trillion in annual federal grants. To critics, the new regulation would only make it easier for Mr. Trump to strike wider tranches of congressionally approved funding over political differences.

“The risk that the Trump administration is willing to go to extreme lengths to politicize grant-making is not a hypothetical,” said Devin O’Connor, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning group. He previously served in the Biden administration.

“If they are willing to be that blatant about it,” Mr. O’Connor said of the court filing, “then I think we should take seriously when they put forward a framework that would allow for the extreme politicization of grant-making across all of the federal government.”

The White House and the Energy Department did not respond to requests for comment.

The administration’s latest concession about the grants came in a lawsuit filed by a group of California researchers challenging various federal agencies that have canceled Biden-era funding.

After reviewing its spending, the Energy Department last fall created a list that recommended canceling more than 600 grants awarded by the Biden administration for a wide range of novel energy projects. That list included funding for projects in states represented by both Republicans and Democrats.

But in October, the White House budget office, led by Russell T. Vought, terminated only 284 of those grants. In a social media post announcing the news, Mr. Vought pointed to the motivations: “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled,” he said.

Months later, in court filings, federal officials indicated there was little else that had informed the final decision about which grants to cancel.

“With one exception,” a lawyer for the Energy Department conceded in a court filing this month, “the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators.”

The lawyer acknowledged that none of the grants were included in the October terminations “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”

In contrast, the administration left untouched hundreds of additional energy grants in states that were represented by Republicans and had backed Mr. Trump in the last election, even though the Energy Department had recommended canceling them, the government confirmed in the July court filing.

The cancellations coincided with a broader White House effort at the time to pressure Democratic lawmakers to cave in a fight over funding that had shut down the government. That month, Mr. Trump had vocalized the strategy: He threatened openly to slash what he described as “Democrat agencies,” while Mr. Vought announced a series of additional spending cuts targeting other Democratic-led states.

As a result, the administration’s actions halted funding for hundreds of energy projects, including upgrades to electrical grids in states like California and Oregon; efforts to reduce methane leaks from oil and gas operations in Colorado; and large hubs to produce clean-burning hydrogen fuels in California and the Pacific Northwest. Some awardees later sued the Trump administration in an effort to restore their grants.

Federal officials offered the new details about the grant cancellations as part of an agreement with plaintiffs meant to spare the government an exhaustive, evidence-uncovering process known as discovery, the court filings said. That process could have required federal agencies to hand over more damaging records.

The agreement applied to other federal agencies targeted by the lawsuit, including the Department of Transportation and the Department of Health and Human Services. Some agencies later revealed new details about the ways in which they reviewed their grants — using specific keywords tied to Mr. Trump’s political priorities and past directives — for possible cancellations, according to additional court documents this month. Lawyers for the plaintiffs did not respond to a request for comment.

The filings also appeared to undermine the congressional testimony of Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who spoke about the cancellations in a June House hearing: “No decisions were made on politics.”

The Energy Department previously conceded in two other cases that politics had been a “primary reason” for the cancellations. In those cases, Amit P. Mehta, a judge in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, eventually ruled that the agency had improperly canceled more than a dozen grants. But the latest concession is far more detailed and sweeping, and it sparked new anger on Capitol Hill.

Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the chamber’s appropriations committee, and Representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, a Democrat who leads her party on the House’s top energy appropriations panel, said in a joint statement on Friday that politically minded grant cuts amounted to an “outright un-American” weaponization of government.

“This administration has now admitted in court what has long been obvious: It terminated nearly 300 cost-cutting energy projects for no reason other than the fact that the states they were in did not vote for the president in the 2024 election,” they added. “This is an astounding admission that the president and his team corruptly abused their power to kill good jobs and punish hard-working families because of their political views.”

Many Democrats have raised those same concerns as the White House looks to assert even greater control over federal grants. Those proposed regulations, which are expected to be completed by October, would require Mr. Trump’s political appointees to review all federal grants, with the power block or revoke money if they did not conform to administration priorities.

The White House has also sought to layer additional restrictions on grant recipients, limiting their political activities, memberships and even appearances at conferences, along with vague requirements that they cannot use the money for certain purposes, including those deemed “anti-American.”

The proposed rules have sparked widespread backlash from antipoverty groups, arts practitioners, city leaders, law enforcement officials, scientists and others. These critics flooded the government with thousands of comments arguing that the measures could undermine crucial government services.

But the administration has maintained that the new rules would help to prevent waste and align federal spending with Mr. Trump’s priorities. Testifying at a congressional hearing this month, Mr. Vought said it would ensure “that we have democratic control of the spending that is going out.”

The filing excerpt does not explicitly state that officials chose those grants in order to punish states for their political preferences, voters, elected officials, or opposition to the president. The conclusion of retaliation therefore depends on an interpretation of the facts and an inference about intent, rather than any admission or proof of motive contained in the quoted material.

Tony Romm and Brad Plumer of the New York Times reported this afternoon that the Trump administration’s claim last October that it was cutting programs in order to protect taxpayers against waste was, in fact, a lie. In court filings, federal officials admitted that the $7.5 billion in cuts from clean energy projects begun under former president Joe Biden were “based solely” on whether states had voted for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.

Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought announced the cuts by saying, “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled.” But, in fact, a government lawyer told the court that none of the cancellations were “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”

In contrast, the administration funded grants for states that had backed Trump in 2024, even though the Energy Department had recommended they be cancelled.

The admission calls into question the administration’s claims that it is making cuts to combat “waste, fraud, and abuse,” especially as Vought is working to finalize rules that would make political appointees the final arbiters of how the government would award more than $1 trillion in annual grants. Rather than combating waste, it appears Trump and his cronies are trying to take control of the United States government, using the power of the American people for their own ends.

Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker promptly pointed out that the cancelled grants included $583 million intended for Illinois “that would have gone toward lowering energy costs, strengthening grid reliability, and creating energy jobs.” He demanded the funds be restored. “Despite what he might think, Donald Trump is not the president of MAGA,” Pritzker said in a statement, but “the president of all America. He must release remaining federal grants to Illinois immediately.”

Pritzker can add the energy grants to Trump’s tab. After the Supreme Court declared Trump’s April 2025 tariffs unconstitutional in February 2026, Pritzker wrote a public letter billing Trump for an $8.68 billion refund to the people of Illinois. “Your tariff taxes wreaked havoc on farmers, enraged our allies, and sent grocery prices through the roof,” he wrote. “On behalf of the people of Illinois, I demand a refund of $1,700 for every family in Illinois. There are 5,105,448 households in my state, bringing the total damages you owe to $8,679,261,600.” Pritzker reiterated that demand on July 20.

But Trump is clinging to his determination to surround the United States with a tariff wall.

At 12:01 this morning, Trump levied tariffs from 10% to 12.5% on goods from more than 80 countries that make up 99.4% of U.S. trade, claiming the countries are producing goods with forced labor. More likely, this argument justifies tariffs under a different law than the one that led the Supreme Court to strike down his 2025 “Liberation Day” tariffs. It’s also a different law than the one he used to impose tariffs after the Supreme Court decision. The time limit permitted for new tariffs under that law expired today.

Kevin Breuninger of CNBC reported that within hours of the announcement of the new tariffs, two small businesses sued in the U.S. Court of International Trade, saying the new tariffs were just a way to reinstate the tariff levies the Supreme Court said were unconstitutional.

A senior administration official told reporters that the tariffs were not an attempt to recreate the previous system and that dealing with the issue of forced labor “is something that President Trump has been focused on…for many years.”

Annie Linskey and Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal reported today that Trump is angry and frustrated over the Iran War, from which he cannot seem to find an exit. They wrote that some of Trump’s advisors are worried at what the war is doing to his popularity by causing higher prices as well as the deaths of 18 service members.

That concern is likely behind the change in the number of U.S. military personnel listed on a Pentagon website as killed in the Iran conflict. Helene Cooper, Lara Jakes, and John Ismay of the New York Times reported yesterday that the Pentagon has dropped the names of the four Americans killed in Jordan and Iraq, reducing the number of U.S. personnel killed in the conflict to 14.

Three military officials told the reporters that the number was revised because the four were killed after Trump announced the ceasefire in April. The acting press secretary for the Pentagon, Joel Valdez, said the four were dropped owing to “temporary data disruptions.” But claiming the four died after a ceasefire bolsters the administration’s insistence that the president doesn’t need to get congressional approval for continuing operations against Iran because the April ceasefire declaration ended the first operation.

The record of the Trump administration on July 24, 2026, shows a White House focused on the goals of Trump alone. It’s a striking contrast to a Fireside Chat broadcast over the radio on July 24, 1933. In that talk, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took stock of what he had accomplished in his first 100 days in office.

He explained that his administration had stabilized the nation’s banks and raised taxes to pay for millions in borrowing. That federal money was feeding starving people, as well as employing 300,000 young men to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps planting trees to prevent soil erosion, building levees and dams for flood control, and maintaining forest roads and trails. It was also funding a public works program for highways and inland navigation, as well as state-based municipal improvements. The government had also raised farm income and wages by regulating agriculture and abolishing child labor.

FDR urged Americans to get behind a program of shorter hours and higher wages to create purchasing power that would restart the economy. He explained: “It goes back to the basic idea of society and of the Nation itself that people acting in a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about.”