“We’re fighting wars, we can’t take care of … daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things… We have to take care of one thing: military protection.”—President Donald J. Trump
Every bomb dropped abroad is a bill sent home.
Every war waged in the name of “security” is paid for by Americans who go without—without affordable healthcare, without stable housing, without a government that prioritizes their well-being.
As the U.S. pours trillions into endless wars and military expansion, Americans are left paying the price—not just in dollars, but in lost freedoms and eroded constitutional protections.
This is not national defense.
This is organized theft.
While Americans struggle with rising gas prices, soaring grocery bills, and mounting debt—fueled in part by reckless tariffs and preemptive wars—the federal government is spending money it doesn’t have on military expansion, foreign conflicts, and presidential excess.
This is not America First.
If anything, it is becoming painfully clear that Donald Trump’s “America First” approach to governing puts America last every time.
Trump has not made it a priority to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure. He has not made it a priority to invest in innovation or ensure that the nation remains competitive in a rapidly advancing technological world. Nor has he shown much concern for caring for veterans, the elderly, or the young.
Instead, the government is cutting back on programs that make Americans healthier, smarter, and more secure—while the president builds monuments to himself and indulges in a taxpayer-funded lifestyle of staggering excess.
Despite once claiming he would be too busy to play golf, Trump is on track to leave taxpayers with a bill exceeding $300 million in travel and security expenses—much of it tied to frequent trips to his Florida properties. Each visit to Mar-a-Lago costs an estimated $3.4 million.
Meanwhile, taxpayers are shelling out $273,063 per hour to keep Air Force One in the air.
And while millions of Americans struggle to afford basic necessities, Trump is demanding $377 million—an 866 percent increase—to renovate the White House residence.
But these excesses, outrageous as they are, pale in comparison to the true cost of this administration’s priorities: war.
The Trump administration has requested $1.5 trillion for its FY 2027 military budget—separate from an additional $200 billion in emergency funding for the war in Iran.
The sitting president of the United States is spending money that is not his to spend in order to fight endless wars unauthorized by Congress that do nothing to protect the American people or our interests, while insisting that the federal government’s only priority should be the military industrial complex.
In addition to increasing the budget for the military, prisons, nuclear weapons, and a weaponized Justice Department, the Trump administration has also proposed budget cuts of $73 billion to non-military programs—slashing funding for medical research, public schools, and low-income heating assistance, as well as cuts to affordable housing, job training, small-business lending, anti-poverty programs, agriculture, NASA, research in social sciences and economics, humanitarian assistance and global health programs, among others.
As Dominik Lett writes for Cato, “Shifting dollars from domestic programs to the Pentagon is shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic given our mounting fiscal crisis.”
This is how empires fall.
The Constitution does not permit a president to wage war on a whim.
The founders were clear: the power to declare war rests with Congress, not the executive. The president, as Commander in Chief, was meant to oversee the military—not unleash it unchecked.
And yet, once again, we find ourselves embroiled in an unauthorized war—funded by taxpayers, justified with shifting narratives, and carried out without meaningful oversight.
With Congress unwilling to act as a check on executive overreach, and the courts increasingly sidelined, the constitutional safeguards meant to prevent this very scenario have all but collapsed.
War is no longer a last resort.
It has become a business model.
The man who campaigned on a pledge of “no new wars” has instead propelled the nation into endless military conflicts that promise to become endless wars that enrich defense contractors, reward political allies, and deepen the financial burden on the American people.
Reports of insider profiteering tied to shifting policy decisions only reinforce what many Americans already suspect: that war, in the Trump era, is as much about profit as it is about power.
Historian Timothy Snyder, who has written extensively on authoritarian regimes, sees the administration’s expanded war budget through a darker and more troubling lens—by which military spending functions as a way to bribe the military into supporting a Trump-led government takeover.
Translation: the Trump administration could be laying the groundwork for a false flag terrorist attack that would allow Trump to declare martial law, cancel or nullify the midterm elections and shift the nation further towards a dictatorship.
The danger is not theoretical.
History has shown, time and again, that leaders who accumulate unchecked power, surround themselves with loyalists, and normalize perpetual war often turn those powers inward.
Which brings us back to the war in Iran—a costly, dangerous, and deeply suspect conflict that raises more questions than answers and provides a conveniently timed distraction from Trump’s presence within the Epstein files.
Despite President Trump and Pete Hegseath’s incessant claims of lethality and success, victory is not a foregone conclusion.
And the price we are paying is high indeed, in treasure and life.
Credible concerns point to the fact that key details about the true cost of this war—which “we the people” are entitled to know—are being withheld from the public.
Even the administration’s account of a dramatic rescue mission of a downed weapons system officer—one involving massive resources and the destruction of U.S. aircraft—is coming under scrutiny, with some suggesting it may have been more in the way of a failed ground invasion to seize Iran’s enriched uranium.
Which begs the question: can we trust the U.S. government to tell us the truth?
Can we trust a government that wages wars for profit, jails its own people for profit, and shields those in power from accountability?
As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the government was never meant to be trusted. It was meant to be restrained by the chains of the Constitution.
It turns out that the greatest threat to freedom is not a foreign enemy.
The greatest threat to freedom is a government that no longer fears, values or serves its people.
Don’t fall for the lie.
Reprinted with permission from the Rutherford Institute.
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