Donald Trump’s budget is titled “America First” but it gives a special place to Israel. “Israel would be the only country to escape the Trump administration’s proposed deep cuts in foreign aid, the State Department said Thursday,” says The Los Angeles Times.
The Republican Jewish Coalition is very happy:
Trump shows his commitment on strong ties w/Israel by maintaining defense aid, while making necessary cuts elsewhere
So is the Times of Israel: “Outlining budget, Trump puts aid to Israel first while slashing elsewhere.”
President Donald Trump released his first budget blueprint Thursday, leaving aid to Israel unscathed even as he called for massive cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Labor Department and the State Department.
The budget proposal “provides $3.1 billion to meet the security assistance commitment to Israel, currently at an all-time high [sic]; ensuring that Israel has the ability to defend itself from threats and maintain its Qualitative Military Edge,” according to a copy of the document, titled “America First.”
The Los Angeles Times again. Israel is unscathed, but climate change is a loser.
The budget plan from the White House calls for slashing the State Department’s $50 billion budget by about 28%, cuts that would mostly target climate change, democracy promotion and health programs, and numerous foreign aid projects…
Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman, said U.S. aid to Israel, which totaled about $3.1 billion this year, would not be touched under the Trump plan. Israel gets more U.S. aid than any other nation.
Aid to every other country will come under review, he said.
Here’s Mark Toner at yesterday’s State Department press briefing:
[O]ur assistance to Israel is, if I could say, a cutout on the budget, and that’s guaranteed, and that reflects, obviously, our strong commitment to one of our strongest partners and allies. With respect to other assistance levels, foreign military assistance levels, those are still being evaluated and decisions are going to be made going forward…
Q. So Israel is the only country that has been assured in this budget that their assistance will continue?
with respect to Israel, that is correct. It was the only one that was singled out or cut out of – in the budget that we will maintain our commitment to Israel.
In related report, Defense News reports on American subsidies for other countries’ weapons purchases: “The Trump administration is mulling plans to kill U.S. subsidies for foreign allies to buy American-made weapons outright and replace them with a loans program.”
“The idea is to replace all foreign military financing, or FMF, grants with loans, save for the security aid committed to Israel — which makes up more than half of the $5.7 billion program.”
“Why is the American Jewish community so determined to convince itself that we are living in 1938. Why does the most successful, the most well integrated, the most culturally and politically influential, the most socially and economically well situated Jewish community since the late years of the Roman republic, why is it so worried about the demon of anti-Semitism—more worried than the Jewish community in any other country I know and certainly more worried than Israel itself? It’s an American issue.”
Is this satire? Of course Trump is anti-Semitic! So what if his daughter married a Jew? The Kushners are anti-Semitic pro-Zionist kapos. Their grand plan is to scare the Jews out of the US into Israel with a series of JCC bomb threats. This is the old Zionist strategy – nothing new. Then Trump-Flynn-Bannon’s plan was for Iran to nuke Tel Aviv. Remember, the Zionists are partly responsible for abandoning Jews to the Holocaust, and are now responsible for the exploitation of hundreds of thousands of ultra-orthodox. There is nothing new here. I honestly can’t tell if this is satire, and yes Trump is an idiot but he’s not that dumb.
And yes it’s absurd to claim that Jews are oppressed. That’s partly why this plan will fail bigly. It’s all very funny to watch it play out. The day of reckoning is nigh!
Also most Republicans will not vote for an increase in ‘defense’ spending or funds for Israel unless they think that Trump will be gone – they recognize he is too dangerous. (I actually expect Pence to be in power soon.)
“Their grand plan is to scare the Jews out of the US into Israel with a series of JCC bomb threats. – ”
That is a strange and prejudiced comment. American Jews are for the most part an extremely tough group of people – well educated, strong, with many serving in the military and engaged in sports at the highest level. They are most certainly not easily scared and I doubt whether anyone would even remotely entertain the idea of giving up their American homes because of a bomb threat. All this has a smell of old cliches about diaspora Jews that just wait scared in their houses while the local thugs throw stones.
Nothing could be farther from the truth nowadays. I would say that for us, the United States is the promised land.
Trump’s budget cuts spending which benefits a lot of the poor white people who voted for him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5gm07oKdt0
https://www.ft.com/content/a6cdada8-0a60-11e7-97d1-5e720a26771b
“It proposes cutting every federal department barring the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security. Some, such as the state department and the Environmental Protection Agency, would be slashed by almost a third. Others, including agriculture, labour, education and commerce would face cuts of up to a fifth. Whole programmes, such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Legal Services Corporation, which funds legal aid to those who cannot afford it, would be closed down altogether. Others facing the axe would include Nasa’s climate research budget, which is too “earth-centric”, according to the White House. The world-renowned National Institutes of Health would shrink by a fifth. The Internal Revenue Service would be cut by 5 per cent.To one degree or another, Mr Trump wants to cut everything in order to fatten up the military budget and build a border wall with Mexico”
Mexico won’t pay either.
I think the GOP will collapse when Zionism does.
Trump is insane
http://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2017/03/17/trump-behind-health-care-bill-sot.cnn
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trumptanic-approaches-repeal-iceberg-everything-is-fine
Trumps intends cutting the Meals on Wheels program, depriving the elderly and veterans who are housebound of healthy meals, but will not touch the aid that we send to Israel. Is this what America voted for? Israel first, then our elderly and veterans? These are very selective cuts.