We Thought We Were Better than This. We're Not.
Trump's budget makes the U.S. a police state, throwing millions off healthcare while giving ICE $168 billion, including $45 billion to build internal concentration camps.
Early Thursday morning, the House agreed to bring Donald Trump’s budget to the floor after the Senate passed its version earlier this week. The bill creates a police state, setting aside $45 billion for construction of internal prison camps like the one Mr. Trump visited in Florida to celebrate the bill’s passage. The budget invests in these camps while it cuts funding for food, medicine, and education and gives money to the wealthiest amongst us. These spending priorities reflect the worst of what we are.
This budget is compassion’s repudiation. It rewards the powerful and punishes the weak, the poor, the sick, the stranger. I swear it reflects no values of mine, but a good portion of our populace thinks it is beautiful.
How broken is America’s moral compass that is should point in such a direction!
And the part Trump and Vance are proudest of is the money they got for building concentration camps as part of their effort to deport millions.
“Everything else — the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy — is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions,” Vance declared. Throwing millions off their health insurance is not minutia, but hey, they might get coverage if they go to work as camp wardens.
The vile rush to deport 15 million people (something this budget sets aside staggering funds to achieve) is hardly new in history. We thought we were better. We are not. It is almost too painful to contemplate, but we must.
Here’s a thought experiment. Consider the Nazi board game, Juden Raus! Here’s how the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes the game:
Juden Raus! (Jews Out!) was a board game in which players competed to collect as many Jews as possible and send them to Palestine. The players rolled the dice, and if they landed on a circle that represented a Jewish business — they collected a cone with an anti-Jewish stereotype on it, which was then placed on top of the player’s token.
The game ended when one player had collected six “Jews.” The game promoted Nazi Germany’s policy of forced Jewish emigration.
Now imagine rebranding the game by replacing Juden with the current hateful propaganda term illegals. Put Trump’s name and image on the box. Would it sell in America?
You know it would.
Earlier this year, Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem cut a promotional video at the CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador. Doubling down, yesterday, Trump himself proudly launched the first of what he promises will be a chain of American camps, complete with a moat full of alligators and pythons. It’s his update to the older version that used snarling German Shepherds to terrify prisoners.
If compassion is not your thing, it’s worth noting that the CATO Institute claims these deportations will cost America nearly another trillion dollars. This calculation includes the lost tax revenue from immigrants as well as the direct costs of enforcement.
Morally and fiscally repellent, these camps are about to become commonplace, as established by law and funded by this “beautiful bill” - the very same law that will strip Americans of health insurance, take food away from children, end the fight against climate change, all to give more money to the wealthiest amongst us.
Congress may soon pass Trump’s law. The shame of it will last for all time.
Edwin Eisendrath hosts "The Big Picture" on WCPT820 AM/ Heartland Signal. He's the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a long-time management consultant, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago's public schools. You can follow him on BlueSky at eisendrath.net and Substack at “It’s the Democracy, Stupid.” Read the original column here.
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We don't need to build more "Alligator Alcatraz" camps. We just need to rehab the 120 year old ones we already have--Manzanar, Tule Lake, etc.--all of which are in remote locations. As a bonus, we could hire George Takei as a consultant who had spent a part of his childhood in the original ones.
We have lost our bearings and our minds. Again.
Throughout our history, we've been subjected to periodic outbreaks of hysteria of one kind or another. In the 17th century it was witchcraft trials that resulted in the deaths of innocent people. We've had violent, nationalist movements like the Know Nothings, followed later by Neo-fascist movements involving prominent Americans like Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh. That was followed by Japanese-American internment camps here in the US, which ironically was fighting a war against fascism. We've had the ugliness of Jim Crow in which countless black lives were lost to lynchings, some carried by our own states. We've endured the Red Scare in which Americans accused their fellow citizens of communism to save their own hides. And, worst of all, we've had slavery and genocides of non-white people; slavery was even written into our Constitution.
These hysterias keep happening because we never learn our lesson and hold the people responsible for them accountable. Our history is sanitized and Disney-fied. Trump and MAGA world are pushing the teaching of 'patriotic' history where only the good and uplifting parts are taught - not the sad, often ugly, side effects of our actions.
Right now we're living through a lengthy backlash against the election of our first Black president. Trump rose to prominence on the strength of the lie that Obama wasn't really an American - something the good and decent among us were shocked to find far too many of our neighbors wanted to believe. The current purge of DEI, 'wokeness', the erasure of non-white Americans from our history, and especially the physical removal of brown people from our midst all has its origin in the election of a Black man to the presidency, something that shattered the comfort of too many Americans even if they won't own up to it. Yet, those very people are cheering the idea of brown bodies being thrown into cages in a Florida swamp with the possibility they'll be attacked by alligators or pythons. It's bread and circuses in modern America.
A couple of weeks ago, Jim Acosta said we're suffering from a 'decency crisis' in this country. If you look at the actions of this administration and the compliant, servile republicans who support it, it's hard to argue with that premise.