Incorrigible truth-teller Dr. Ron Paul recently pointed out that cutting military spending would make for a big and beautiful bill; certainly a bit more beautiful than the One Bloated Brobdingnagian Bill (falsely labeled the “One Big Beautiful Bill”) that House Republicans—with the notable exceptions of Thomas Massie and Warren Davidson—actually voted for. Paul astutely observed that cutting the Pentagon would be much more popular with voters than the widely-touted cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, which (as Davidson pointed out) amount to fake deficit-reduction anyways since these cuts only apply to later fiscal years and would be easily repudiated by future Congresses. Such illusory cuts aren’t likely to survive anyways once the “One Bill to Rule Them All” is taken up by the Senate.

Contrary to Dr. Paul’s prescription, President Trump asked for a $119.3 billion increase in military spending for FY2026, including a costly space-based missile defense system, additional pork for Naval shipbuilders and other defense industries, and an arms and munitions build-up directed against China. Not to be outdone in making the bill uglier, the House Armed Services Committee jacked up the military spending increase to $150 billion. Unfortunately, Republicans are not heeding Dr. Paul’s advice to give up costly, counterproductive overseas crusades; a foreign policy which would generate a peace dividend by focusing the military on just defending American territory (as advocated by the original pre-World War II America First movement) while encouraging friendly foreign powers to build up their own strategic defense capabilities on their own dime. …

The One Bloated Brobdingnagian Bill passed by the House is a stark confession by Republicans that they are the party of FDR and LBJ, not a party that cares about reducing the size and power of the welfare-warfare state. Consistent with the symptoms of the Stockholm syndrome, the party’s conservative hostages have come to identify with their shamelessly corrupt captors to such an extent that they willfully evade the fact that their leader is victimizing them by embracing statist economic policies and by openly scorning the Constitution and the rule of law. Republicans seem to be helpless to object to anything the President says or does. Congress hasn’t passed a formal enabling act to hand its powers over to the President yet, but—apart from a handful of dissidents—Republican representatives and senators have scarcely exhibited much political will of their own lately.

The political risk to Republicans in all this is that as the malfunctioning American economy sinks into chaos, the ascendant socialist wing of the Democratic Party will be quick to fix the blame on Republicans and ride a tide of public anger back into power. The One Bloated Brobdingnagian Bill is also a confession of the Republican Party’s present moral, intellectual, and financial bankruptcy, reflecting its unilateral ideological disarmament in the face of its overtly collectivist enemies and its inability to implement sound fiscal and monetary policies to reverse America’s industrial decline and to save the dollar from a hyperinflationary collapse. Trump will not be able to hold onto power with lies, lawlessness, and corruption indefinitely, and his feckless party won’t be able to cope with the backlash against his dysfunctional regime once the public discerns the true nature of the Emperor’s New Clothes.