Since taking office as president of the United States, Donald Trump has seen to the hemorrhaging of tax dollars through such means as his repeated trips to his golf courses. He also has plans for massive expenditures in the future along the same lines such as a wall along the entire border between the United States and Mexico. It’s not as though there is some broadly documented necessity for the wall, and yet, he still wants to spend the billions and billions of dollars needed to put it up and maintain it anyway.
Despite these facts, Trump continues to cast himself as a fiscal conservative. In a Tuesday afternoon Twitter meltdown, he went after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for supposedly being advocates of wasteful spending.
He wrote:
‘Imagine how much wasteful spending we’d save if we didn’t have Chuck and Nancy standing in our way! For years, Democrats in Congress have depleted our military and busted our budgets on needless spending, and to what end? No more.’
To be clear, it’s not as though Democrats are the ones behind some of the most recent glaring examples of bloated spending. It’s Republicans who are in control of Congress and pushed through the massive, deficit-expanding spending bill that the president begrudgingly signed earlier this year.
Trump, however, prefers to gloss over this detail and continue on with his personal vendetta-infused political maneuvering. The facts of a situation seem to matter less to him than his ability to lash out at his critics.
Also Tuesday afternoon, continuing on with that trend of glossing over the actual facts of the situation and his role in it, the president touted a package his administration has proposed to slash some $15 billion from that aforementioned spending bill that he signed earlier this year.
He wrote:
‘The HISTORIC Rescissions Package we’ve proposed would cut $15,000,000,000 in Wasteful Spending! We are getting our government back on track.’
That $15 billion is set to be drawn from programs across government including the Children’s Health Insurance Program, otherwise known as CHIP, and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, which was created by the Affordable Care Act. The money set to be taken from CHIP should the president’s plan be put in action has been claimed to be leftover.
Both CHIP and the ACA have come under fire from Trump and his allies in the past; Republicans in Congress delayed renewing any funding for CHIP at all until it was conjoined to the later issue of funding for immigration reform. In that way, they were able to claim Democrats who didn’t want to support Trump’s ideas of immigration reform were setting out to hurt American children.
In addition, although their plans failed, Trump and his Republican allies in Congress set out last year to completely repeal the Affordable Care Act, which has provided health coverage to millions of Americans.
It’s all part of a familiar pattern of the president attempting to mold the face of American government to his wishes, which includes spiting those he dislikes.
Check out Twitter’s response below.
Featured Image via Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
