The Iran war’s second front is at home

In a phone interview with Axios later Sunday morning, the president reiterated his threats of massive, indiscriminate destruction that, according to experts, would likely constitute a war crime: “There is a good chance [of a deal being reached with Iran], but if they don’t make a deal, I am blowing up everything over there.”

Trump renewed his threats on Monday during a White House briefing, where he demanded that Iran open the Strait of Hormuz by 8:00 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday night. If the nation’s leaders didn’t comply by midnight, destruction would follow, he said: “The entire country could be taken out in one night.”

The president’s threats are not dark jokes or mere impulses. They are very real and must be taken seriously. But our focus on them can serve to obscure an important point: Trump is burning the American people’s money to pay for his expanding war against Iran. His administration’s militarism is making the American people less safe while systematically undermining the country’s economy, democracy and overall quality of life. 

A gangster nation is rarely prosperous — at least for the average person.  According to estimates, the war against Iran costs more than $1 billion a day, with a total cost of at least $50 billion so far. The Pentagon has already requested over $200 billion in additional funding from Congress. But last week, the Trump administration went even further, submitting an overall budget request totaling $1.5 trillion for the military in 2027. The amount represents an increase of $500 billion from its 2026 authorization, with America already spending more on national defense than the next 9 to 10 nations combined, including Russia and China.

As POLITICO noted, with an already-struggling economy and an unpopular war, the Pentagon’s skyrocketing defense budget could hurt Republicans electorally. But the more important reality is this: Trump’s budget request reflects America’s collapsing social democracy and the authoritarian logic driving Trump and his MAGA allies. 

The historian and fascism expert Timothy Snyder believes the Pentagon budget is actually an attempt to bribe the military into supporting the president’s plans to be America’s first dictator. “Trump wants to increase the defense budget by nearly 50% without any review of what the money is for; this is strategic nonsense, and has to be understood as a payoff for the men who, as he imagines, will help him install a dictatorship,” he warned in a recent essay. “Hegseth is meanwhile purging the highest officer ranks of people of principle.” 

At an Easter luncheon held at the White House last Wednesday, Trump said, “The United States can’t take care of day care. It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things, they can do it on a state basis… We have to take care of one thing: military protection.” 

The long-standing tension between how much a government should spend on guns and how much it should allocate to butter — the social safety net and other investments in human capital — was most famously seen during the Vietnam War, as President Lyndon Johnson sought to fund the growing conflict in Southeast Asia and the War on Poverty. Trump’s answer to that quandary is simple: guns, guns and more guns, along with some tax cuts and subsidies for the wealthy thrown in for good measure.

His proposed budget is the next step in a decades-long project by the American right to fundamentally change the relationship between the American people and their government.

As historian Nancy MacLean details in her book “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America,” right-wing libertarians from Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and James Buchanan to the Koch brothers have believed that the federal government’s only responsibilities are national defense, law enforcement, the courts and creating a structure that further concentrates wealth and power among the elite. These ideas, once relegated to the party’s fringes, are now mainstream GOP ideology.

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Since returning to office, Trump and his allies, with the leadership of Office and Management and Budget Director — and Project 2025 architect — Russell Vought, have been implementing this vision. Its prime example is the Big Beautiful Bill, which made vast cuts to the social safety net, transferred trillions of taxpayer dollars to the richest Americans and corporations, and allowed subsidies for the Affordable Care Act to expire.

But Trump’s war against Iran — and his militant nationalism more broadly, as seen in Venezuela and, in all likelihood, in Cuba — is not separate from his domestic agenda. His repeated threats to suspend the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election have helped to put the nation into a perpetual crisis footing that conveniently justifies gutting nearly everything except the military and the national security state.

Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and their allies messengers will, predictably, recycle the argument that bloated military budgets help to grow the economy by creating “good American jobs.” The evidence strongly suggests otherwise. Military spending generates fewer jobs and less economic growth than comparable spending on education, infrastructure, health care, clean energy and other social safety net programs.

America cannot be strong abroad if it is hollowing itself out at home, especially as our competitors, including China, are making huge investments in human capital, as well as soft power abroad, because their leaders understand this calculus.

In his 1953 speech “The Chance for Peace,” a Republican president warned about the human cost of militarism.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a former Army general, said. “This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

More than 70 years later, Donald Trump enthusiastically rejects such wisdom. He is most certainly not “Making America Great Again” or birthing a new golden age. His imperial dreams are instead an American nadir.