Trump Is Robbing American Families to Bankroll His Billionaires Abroad

Trump is stealing money from your kids and handing it to rich people overseas. He told America he was going to stop wasting taxpayer money abroad, so he shut down USAID and put most of its staff on indefinite leave and called it America First. Then his State Department turned around and sent twelve million dollars to right-wing think tanks in the United Kingdom — including seven million to a group called 878, co-founded by the multimillionaire former minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, which appears to have been incorporated in the UK in March. A man whose personal net worth is estimated at more than a hundred million pounds, collecting seven million of American tax dollars for a think tank that did not exist five months ago. The embassy in London is also taking applications for up to half a million dollars in “public education” grants, to foster a “national conversation” about “shared civilizational values.”

I want to sit with the phrase “public education.” I sponsor a tool-and-tuition program at the high school in town, the one that was going to teach kids how to turn wrenches and earn a real wage. Last spring the school board cut it. The state funding didn’t carry it. Three months later I read that the State Department is offering half a million in “public education” grants to people in London. They kept that word. They just aimed it somewhere else.

I want to say where I am standing, because it matters to the accusation’s reach. I run a four-bay auto shop in a small Georgia town. I employ four mechanics, a service writer, and a parts manager. The shop is a profit-sharing cooperative, which is to say I do not get rich the way the people in this story get rich. I know what a working household looks like because working households bring their cars into my shop. The man with the 2003 F-150 who needs the transmission rebuilt. The widow on Social Security who brings in the Civic for a brake job and tells me the prescription copay went up again. The veteran from the post who can’t get the VA to process his claim. The school teacher who waits three weeks for the alternator because her old car is the only one she can afford. I see what they can pay, and I see what they can’t. I have been seeing it for fifteen years. It is worse now than it was five years ago. It is going to be worse five years from now.

Twelve million dollars for a network of right-wing political operations in Europe is not the math I want to see on the page. A man worth a reported hundred million pounds is collecting American tax dollars for a think tank that did not exist five months ago. The applications are open. The German chancellor has already warned this administration against interfering in German elections. CPAC, the right’s main gathering, has gone international — last year in Warsaw, with Kristi Noem breaking norms to back the Polish candidate who ran on “Poland first, Poles first”; this month in London, with Liz Truss fronting the British franchise. The national security strategy published last December said Europe faced “civilizational erasure” and that U.S. policy must include “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” The Warsaw conference, the London grants, the strategy at home — same program, different venues. These are not isolated initiatives. They add up to a coordinated project to export the movement under the banner of saving Western civilization.

Here is what America First actually delivered to the customers who come into my shop. The Department of Education’s workforce has been cut by roughly half. Public school funding has not recovered from a decade of cuts, and the programs that used to give a working family a path — vocational training, after-school care, the kind of thing the high school shop class used to be — are on the chopping block. The Child Tax Credit, when it existed, lifted a lot of children out of poverty for a year. Then it was allowed to expire. The SAVE plan for student-loan borrowers was struck down, and by spring of this year the people I know who were on it were watching their payments triple. Every program that touched a household budget was cut. But the State Department found twelve million for European political projects. The budget always has room for what they actually care about.

I should say this honestly, because the people I am talking about are not me. My shop is paid for. The cooperative is solvent. I do not have a kid in the public schools. The people this actually robs are the ones I see every day at the parts counter — the ones who have to choose between the brake job and the groceries, between the school program and the electric bill, between voting for the promise and finding out what the promise cost. The single mom who works at the plant and drives a fifteen-year-old car because that’s what the budget can carry. The veteran who put in his time and is now trying to get the VA to admit his back is broken. The high school senior who wanted to learn a trade and is going to flip burgers instead because the shop class got cut. Those are the people the State Department is not funding. Those are the people the State Department is taking the money from.

The cuts were the financing. Every dollar slashed from the programs that actually keep a household solvent — from school funding, from the Child Tax Credit, from SAVE, from the high school shop class — did not disappear. It went somewhere. The destination was a network of right-wing operations in Europe, run by people who already have more money than their families will spend in three generations. The betrayal is not personal. It is a government that told you to sacrifice while it paid for someone else’s project.

Trump, for his part, has brushed off cost-of-living concerns, declaring last year: “I don’t want to hear about the affordability.” But the president, who made an estimated $2.2 billion last year, should start listening. A Politico poll last month found that just a third of Trump’s Maga base thought the war in Iran was worth the cost, down from half in May. Influential Trump supporters such as the podcaster Joe Rogan have also turned on the president because of Iran. The twelve million sent to Europe is the same story. The people who voted for this promise are going to find out they are on their own.

The America First agenda was always priced. A permanent expanded Child Tax Credit. School funding that actually reached the classroom. A real childcare subsidy. A high school shop class that taught a kid how to make a living. The money for all of it was real. It just had a different destination. A treasury is not a private fortune. “America First” was supposed to be the opposite of what it just became.

I write a hundred repair estimates in a month. The math is the math. The customers in my shop’s parking lot are the receipt. The trucks that used to be there aren’t. Some people are born into stability. The rest of us inherit a tax bill. You’re on your own, kid.