Fox News is doing its job as a Trump propaganda arm, standing ready to defend Trump’s budget. It helps to read this one in Howard Kurtz’s pompous tones. Start with the headline: “Donald Trump's sharp budget ax: Now the swamp fights back.”
There’s no possibility of legitimate concerns about Trump’s budget here. Objecting just shows you’re a swamp creature.
With President Trump detailing the budget cuts he would make to pay for his sharp rise in defense spending, the battle for control of the swamp is getting under way.
The swamp of Meals on Wheels and public television funding vs. the swamp of an administration stocked with Goldman Sachs staffers and white supremacists? Yup, it’s the Meals on Wheels swamp, apparently:
… even the smaller cuts that Trump wants to make are hard because every program in that gargantuan budget has a fiercely loyal constituency backed up by lobbyists who know how many jobs would be lost and in which congressional districts.
How many jobs would be lost, how many seniors or children would go hungry, how many kids watch PBS every day … powerful constituencies with big lobbying budgets, there.
Those who don’t want their programs slashed have a built-in PR advantage. They can generate coverage of real-life victims who would be hurt by the withdrawal of this or that federal subsidy, while the other side has to make abstract arguments: Government is too wasteful, the deficit is out of control, we’re living beyond our means.
What a fiendish plan, to focus on real-life victims, while the other side has to abstractly argue that we need more military hardware and since we definitely can’t tax rich people to pay for it, those swamp-dwelling victims “hurt by the withdrawal of [food or heating assistance]” definitely had it coming.