President Donald Trump delivered one of his most extensive sales pitches for the Iran war in a primetime address on Wednesday night.
But comments he delivered in a closed-door Easter lunch just hours earlier epitomize why he has utterly failed to make the sale.
In rambling hourlong remarks — video of which was briefly posted on YouTube by the White House and preserved by a reporter for Business Insider — Trump riffed on how the federal government should focus more on funding defense and less on health care and daycare, which should be left to the states.
And at one point, he even set it up as a choice between funding war and funding daycare — while apparently choosing the former.
The president began by recalling a conversation he had with Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.
“I said to Russell, ‘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,” Trump said. “We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people.”
Trump then added, in quick succession: “We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare.”
He said states should raise their taxes to pay for daycare and health care.
“It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare — all these individual things, they can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal,” Trump added. “We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country. But all these little things, all these little scams that have taken place — you have to let states take care of them, Russell.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed on X Thursday that Trump “was talking about the importance of stopping the scams and rooting out the billions of dollars in fraud in these vital programs that elected Democrat officials have allowed to happen.” Trump did briefly mention scams, but his larger argument was about who should pay for such programs.
A few points off the bat about his remarks.
First, he has a point that health care expenditures are a major budgetary problem. They are, in fact, the largest portion of federal spending, and the Congressional Budget Office projects they will grow from around $2 trillion today to around $3 trillion a decade from now.
The other point is that Trump’s argument is more nuanced than just choosing between daycare and the war; he seems to be making a somewhat philosophical point about which level of government should fund which things, not whether they should be funded at all.
But it’s a heck of a way to talk about spending decisions, especially at this juncture.
And a new CNN poll released Wednesday demonstrates why.
The survey reinforces that perhaps Trump’s biggest political problem with the war is how much it’s costing. That’s especially the case with $4-plus gas, but it’s also the case more generally.
Americans don’t see the point of the war, but they especially don’t see the point given the price tag.
Americans opposed the Pentagon’s proposal to spend $200 billion on the war by an overwhelming margin, 71%-29%. Even about 4 in 10 Republicans opposed that.
The poll also showed that, while 66% broadly disapproved of the decision to take military action against Iran, that number increased to 70% when people were asked whether the war was “worth it” — both in terms of lives and the financial burden.
Even 35% of Republicans said the war wasn’t worth it.
The CNN poll echoes an earlier CBS News-YouGov poll that showed 67% of Americans and 36% of Republicans said Americans should not be willing to pay more for gas during the war.
In other words: There is precious little appetite for sacrificing for this particular cause. Yet here’s Trump setting up the choice in some of the most politically unhelpful terms imaginable — between paying for bombs and paying for taking care of children.
And in case you don’t think it’s a bad talking point, consider that it’s very similar to the argument that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was attempting to use against Iran, just two days earlier.
“Imagine an Iran that, instead of spending their wealth, billions of dollars, supporting terrorists or weapons, had spent that money helping the people of Iran,” he said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Monday. “You’d have a much different country.”
Trump and those around him have struggled to talk about these kinds of things before. His meandering answer on childcare was arguably one of his worst moments of the 2024 campaign. And the president and other top administration officials have repeatedly spoken awkwardly about how people can make ends meet in tough economic times and during a period of stubborn inflation. (Remember Trump telling Americans to just buy fewer dolls and pencils.)
But none of those comments came in the context of such a high-profile political issue — and one that was cutting against Trump so much.
The White House must be ruing that they somehow went out publicly.
This story has been updated with comment from Karoline Leavitt.
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