Trump is stealing money from your kids and handing it to rich people overseas.
That is the domestic arithmetic. He told America he was going to stop wasting taxpayer money abroad. He gutted USAID, put most of its staff on indefinite leave, and called it “America First.” Then his State Department turned around and sent $12 million to right-wing think tanks in the UK — including $7 million to an organization called 878, co-founded by Jacob Rees-Mogg, a man whose personal net worth is estimated at more than £100 million. His administration has also offered up to $500,000 for “public education” programs in Britain that promote “shared civilizational values.” Your daughter’s public school can’t afford a nurse. But a multimillionaire in London gets your money to think about civilization.
This is what the betrayal looks like at the kitchen-table level. The administration gutted domestic programs millions of families depend on, then wrote a twelve-million-dollar check to a man with three houses in England. You’re supposed to believe that’s America First.
Here is what America First actually delivered for a household making the median millennial income. The expanded Child Tax Credit lifted roughly four million children out of poverty — then it was allowed to expire, because the political will vanished before the check cleared. The Department of Education’s workforce has been slashed by roughly half — the agency announced plans in March 2025 to cut nearly 50 percent of its staff — while public school funding still has not recovered from decades of cuts the administration has made no move to reverse. The SAVE plan for student-loan borrowers was struck down, and by spring of this year borrowers were watching their payments triple. Every program that touched a family budget was on the chopping block. The State Department, however, found twelve million for European political projects. The budget always has room for what they actually care about.
Twelve million dollars is five thousand months of the invoice my family lives under. It is 416 years of infant care for a Philadelphia toddler, lifted out of one column and handed to a man in London who does not need it, to run a “civilizational partnership” nobody voted for. The math on the kitchen table: center-based infant care in Philadelphia runs about $1,242 a month; care for a preschooler runs about $1,100. Combined for two young children, that is roughly $2,342 a month, or $28,100 a year. Adjust the mix and the household bill lands near $28,800. The national security strategy published last December said U.S. policy must include “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” That sentence is the program. The money has addresses, and the applications are open.
I should say where the “I” is standing, because it matters to the accusation’s reach. I write from a Fishtown row house bought with two incomes and a grandmother’s estate in the down payment. My family is the lucky version of this story, and the people this actually robs are not me: the kids in districts that can’t pay for the special-education services the law promised, the families living on the $310 a month the rent leaves them, the voters in Scranton and Erie who were promised America first and got a war and a lecture about affordability. The rest of us just keep the spreadsheet.
Here is the part that should break the heart of everyone who voted for the promise. It was never a plan for the money to stay home. The USAID circus — the Fox-repeated falsehood about Gaza condoms, with no evidence behind it — was the cover story for the discovery that the money never stopped going abroad. It just stopped going to the world’s poor. Now it goes to the people who will carry the movement’s flag in London and Warsaw and Berlin. The grant calls talk about “civilizational self-confidence.” Nobody at a gas pump voted for that. The German chancellor has already warned the administration against interfering in German elections.
Congress promised in 1975 to pay 40 percent of the cost of special education. Fifty years later the federal government has never once come close — the nearest it ever got was 18 percent, two decades ago, and the share is under 13 percent now, a shortfall now measured in the tens of billions of dollars a year. The Pell Grant covered nearly 80 percent of a four-year public university for my parents’ generation; it covers less than a third now. The same government that is dismantling the Department of Education has found half a million dollars for “public education” in London. Same two words. Only one of them is real.
Annie Lowrey has argued that poverty in the United States is a choice and stagnant middle-class incomes are a choice, because the country has the resources and simply does not want to deploy them for this population. Anne Helen Petersen wrote in Can’t Even that burnout is not a personal problem and it will not be cured by a productivity app or a face mask. The betrayal is not personal either. It is structural: a government that told you to sacrifice while it paid for someone else’s project. The twelve million sent to Europe is the receipt for that choice. The money exists. It was always a question of who gets it. This administration answered that question clearly enough for anyone reading a spreadsheet.
The Catholic social tradition — from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum forward — has always recognized that some people are born into stability and safety while others inherit nothing but a tax bill. A man worth a reported £100 million collecting $7 million of American tax dollars for a think tank that did not exist five months ago is the precise illustration. The tradition has a name for the claim the common good holds on the public treasury: the universal destination of goods. A treasury is not a private fortune, and “America first” was supposed to be the opposite of a vanity fund.
The thing about a kitchen-table spreadsheet is that it is democratic in a way that campaign rhetoric is not. It doesn’t care about slogans. It doesn’t care about “America First” or “civilizational confidence” or “shared values between the United States and the United Kingdom.” It shows the incoming and the outgoing. A $2,400 childcare line item. A 7% mortgage rate. A federal government that took a sledgehammer to every program that helped this family while sending a check to a man in London. The cuts were the financing mechanism: every dollar slashed from school funding, from the Child Tax Credit, from SAVE, from the programs that actually keep households solvent — those dollars didn’t disappear into the Treasury. They were reallocated. The destination was not an American family struggling to pay for preschool.
There is a Taylor Swift song called “You’re On Your Own, Kid” that is the closest thing American care infrastructure has to a mission statement. The friendship-bracelets bridge is the redemptive turn — the only safety net is the lateral one, the other mothers in the group text. The people who are going to find out they are on their own are the people who voted for the promise itself. The president who made an estimated $2.2 billion last year is scoffing at the word “affordability” in Georgia while a third of his own base says the Iran war was worth the cost — down from half in May. The recognition is coming for them the way it came for my generation, at a kitchen table, and then at every gas pump and grocery receipt after.
I moved the same numbers between the same two columns at eleven o’clock last night. The daycare invoice is $2,400. The checks have addresses in London. The arithmetic is not going to change no matter how many times a grant call says “civilizational.”
You’re on your own, kid.