Death over health in Trump’s America

On Wednesday 1 April, Donald Trump delivered one of the worst speeches of his career — and this was no April Fool’s.

The above is really just the tip of the iceberg too.

Bombs not babies

In the clip above, Trump starts talking about daycare but progresses to the national health insurance systems of Medicare and Medicaid (emphasis added):

the United States can’t take care of daycare. That has to be up to a state.

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.

You got to let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it too. They should pay. They have to raise their taxes, but they should pay for it. And we could lower our taxes a little bit to them to make up for it.

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But it’s not possible for us to take care of daycare. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. 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.

As most people now realise, the US isn’t ‘guarding the homeland’—it’s instead doing the opposite to other countries.

If America stopped waging forever wars, it could easily afford daycare and universal health coverage. It could probably afford to give everyone in the world healthcare with how much they spend on war (set to be $1.5tn by 2027).

Even the administration is starting to realise that its military endeavours aren’t money well spent:

Trump had more to say too.

Bad to worse

As the Majority Report’s Emma Vigeland sarcastically highlighted, Trump admitted that he basically likes anyone who sucks up to him—no matter how repellant they are (presumably he’s thinking about Benjamin Netanyahu):

Having failed to achieve any of his objectives in the Iran war, Trump is now asking his allies to clean up his mess:

Trump gave an idea of why the war has gone so badly:

Trump also did some race science:

This is the same guy who has repeatedly bragged about passing cognition tests because he thinks they’re testing his intelligence — not whether he has dementia.

Shocking but not unsurprising

While the things Trump says are constantly unprecedented, we’re at a point now where nothing really shocks.

Of course he’d launch a stupid war and then bail when it got too much.

Of course he’d be the politician to finally admit the US prioritises death over health.

Of course he’d go off on some racist tangent that has nothing to do with the speech at hand.

As grim as this all is, hopefully it makes Americans realise their country is not a force for good, and that this is a situation it can’t keep repeating.

Featured image via the Canary