If you look back from the day-to-day grind of political news at the big picture of Republican policy priorities right now, it’s amazing how much militarism at home and abroad we are seeing, as I pointed out at New York:

With all the bickering between Republicans over the Department of Homeland Security shutdown, it’s easy to miss something pretty important. Now Trump and congressional Republicans are attempting to pre-fund ICE and the Border Patrol for three more years without a single new “guardrail” on the conduct of immigration-enforcement agents. Since they are using the budget-reconciliation process to get this done, Democrats will have zero leverage over ICE practices until Trump has left office, even if they flip one or both houses of Congress this November.

So the struggle over immigration-enforcement policy that flared up when masked agents started killing U.S. citizens in Minneapolis is essentially over for the time being. Perhaps as a matter of public relations the administration will try to rebrand “mass deportation” as something else, but there’s no reason to believe they won’t proceed full speed ahead in doing the dirty work of rounding up, incarcerating, and removing millions of immigrants, many of whom came to America legally. Indeed, there is a new MAGA-aligned coalition arising that is pressing for a major increase in deportation goals, likely by targeting the employers of undocumented immigrants. No matter the packaging, armed and masked agents hunting down immigrants on an unprecedented scale will continue.

Meanwhile, there’s no question Trump’s second term has elevated war-fighting to job No. 1. The president is gambling vast political capital on an unpopular and strangely aimless conflict with Iran that has embroiled the entire Middle East and put America’s relationship with its long-standing NATO allies on life support while risking economic calamity as well.

And aside from the political (and human) costs of Trump’s horrifying new emergence as a warlord, it’s costing a lot of money too — to the point where it’s crowding out other priorities in a federal budget already drowning in red ink, as Trump’s own budget for the next fiscal year will demonstrate, Bloomberg reports:

“President Donald Trump is preparing to release a fiscal year 2027 budget plan on Friday that will frame his party’s midterm election message around a massive defense buildup, partially paid for by cuts to domestic agencies.

“A governing vision that directs tax dollars to the Pentagon amid an unpopular Iran war represents a political risk for the White House, especially against a backdrop of spiking gasoline prices. Trump could also face resistance from within his own party over envisioned cuts to health and science agencies that Congress rejected last year on a bipartisan basis.”

Trump has sworn since his first presidential bid that he won’t touch the “third rail” of cuts in Social Security or Medicare. So his twin devotion to mass deportation and a huge and regularly deployed military means everything else is literally under the gun. The president seems frustrated with the inability of people to understand this simple matter of arithmetic, as NBC News has reported:

“President Donald Trump on Wednesday said it’s ‘not possible’ for the federal government to fund Medicare, Medicaid and child care costs, arguing that it should be up to the states to ‘take care’ of those programs while the federal government focuses on military spending.

“The president’s remarks were delivered to attendees at a private Easter luncheon at the White House, where Trump also accused Democratic-led states of fraud.”

“He went on to say that he told Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, ‘don’t send any money for daycare, because the United States can’t take care of daycare. That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You got to let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it too.’”

It’s reasonably clear a significant majority of Americans have priorities other than mass deportation and “whatever wars.”

No wonder the president’s job-approval ratings are in free fall. A militarized America is not what a lot of Trump 2024 voters bargained for. They will be heard from in November.