At an Easter lunch at the White House today, Donald Trump looked around at a group of families and said, without feeling guilty, that daycare isn’t the federal government’s job. “We can’t take care of daycare,” Trump said. “You should let the states handle daycare, and they should pay for it too. They should pay. They have to raise their taxes.”
So, in short, Trump’s Easter message to working families is basically, “Don’t ask me, go talk to your governor and ask them to raise your taxes if you want any kind of help.”
It wasn’t just daycare that Trump wants the federal government to leave out of.
He also said the same thing about Medicaid and Medicare — programs that millions of elderly, disabled, and low-income Americans rely on to live. “Medicaid, Medicare, all these things, they can do it on a state level,” he said. “You can’t do it on a federal level.”
According to Trump, the federal government has only one job: “Military protection.”
That’s it.
That’s the whole plan.
But no one seems to care that the federal government has been running Medicare since 1965 and has provided healthcare to more than 65 million people.
No one seems to care that Medicaid serves 80 million people — including kids, expectant mothers, nursing home residents, and those with disabilities — and that most states can’t afford it by themselves. No one seems to care that these programs were created at the federal level exactly because the states couldn’t handle them on their own.
And no one seems to care that this is coming from a president who recently approved a $400 million room in the White House, who has spent hundreds of millions on personal golf trips, and whose administration gave billionaires the biggest tax cut in U.S. history.
We can’t afford daycare.
But we can afford all of that?
Also, it’s important to understand what it really means when Trump says “let the states raise their taxes.”
It means the poorest states — often the red states, the ones that voted for Trump — will struggle to pay for these programs. It means a child in Mississippi gets worse care than a child in Massachusetts. It means the safety net for the poor is slowly being torn apart with every block grant.
This isn’t about small government.
This is about giving up on people, dressed up as federalism.
About the Author
