Bizarro GOP Plan: Cut Health Spending to Pay for an Unpopular War

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments -- now including a war in the Middle East.

In early February, a YouGov poll found majorities of Americans supported increasing government spending on veterans (74%), Social Security (69%), Medicare (67%), aid to the poor (64%), Medicaid (59%), and the environment (52%).   Only 34% wanted to increase defense spending -- that that was before the Iran war, which is unpopular.  Last week, Pew found 61% disapproved of Trump's handling of the war, and 59% said that US made the wrong decision to use military force in Iran.

In that light, the House GOP's spending plans sound politically insane.  Peter Sullivan at Axios:

Republicans are considering reductions in federal health spending to help pay for a budget bill containing as much as $200 billion to fund the Iran war and immigration enforcement.

Why it matters: New efforts to rein in health programs are sure to be controversial and open the GOP up to election-year attacks that they're cutting health care to pay for an unpopular war.

Driving the news: Top House Republicans are looking at health care offsets addressing fraud in federal programs, as they did during last year's debate over the budget law that made deep cuts to federal Medicaid spending and imposed first-time work requirements.

Ominous

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments -- now including a war in the Middle East.

Samuel Benson and Liz Crampton at Politico:

In Nevada, a gallon of gas is approaching $5. In Pennsylvania, farmers are fretting about the prices of fertilizer. And in Michigan, supply chain woes are throwing a wrench into the manufacturing and auto industry operations.

One month into the war in Iran, a new political reality is sinking in for Republicans in these and other battlegrounds: The war may not end as quickly as they initially hoped, and the literal and figurative costs keep rising.

Una Hajdari at EuroNews:

European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde has warned that financial markets are underestimating the severity of the economic fallout of the Iran war, saying investors may be in denial about how long the disruption will last.

Speaking to The Economist, Lagarde said the conflict represented "a real shock" that was "probably beyond what we can imagine at the moment."

She pushed back on market optimism, arguing that technical experts saw no quick return to normality given the extent of damage to energy infrastructure. "Most people are actually talking about years," she highlighted.

Lagarde also warned that the true economic consequences were only becoming clear gradually, citing supply chain knock-on effects that markets had yet to fully price in.

She pointed to helium — much of which transits the Strait of Hormuz — as an example of a critical input for microchip production whose scarcity was not yet reflected in semiconductor costs.

"We are learning almost bit by bit, day by day, what the actual consequences will be."

 

Trump Doesn't Listen

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments -- now including a war in the Middle East.

WATCH: Donald Trump is getting his daily briefing on the war in the form of a highlight reel of "stuff blowing up,” NBC News reports. “National intelligence in the form of Instagram Reels, basically,” says Chris Hayes. https://t.co/ByWSf8GW1m

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) March 26, 2026

 SCOTT WALDMAN, BEN JOHANSEN and SOPHIA CAI at POLITICO:

NATE SWANSON spent nearly two decades in the U.S. government, including most recently as the National Security Council’s director for Iran. Days before the U.S. bombed Iran, Swanson published a piece predicting that Iran would do exactly what it has done should the U.S. attack.

That’s expertise President DONALD TRUMP had available to him — until Swanson, an BARACK OBAMA holdover, was “forced out” of his post after a critical tweet from LAURA LOOMER, Swanson said. Neither the White House nor Loomer returned a request for comment.

In his piece for Foreign Policy published Feb. 24, Swanson wrote that Iran would not capitulate after a bombing campaign, but rather escalate and “target global oil flows and international shipping, sending energy prices up and creating a serious political liability for Trump.” And indeed, Iran has made scattershot attacks on energy targets and others across the region, as well as throttling passage through the Strait of Hormuz by threatening attacks on ships.

In an interview with POLITICO this week, Swanson predicted that the Trump administration’s negotiations with Iran will not go well because both sides are “irrationally confident” in their positions. Neither side seems willing to find an off-ramp at this point, he said.
...

Trump keeps saying Iran’s response has surprised him — that no one told him Iran would retaliate against regional energy infrastructure. How does that kind of comment from the president sit with you?

"Obviously, it’s not true. There are many people in the government who told him that there was high risk involved. He just chose not to listen to them. And as someone who was forced out of the government and wrote pretty much exactly what was fairly obviously going to happen, that doesn’t sit super well."

Among the people to whom he does not listen is former Secretary of Defense Mattis.

 

“‘Targetry’ does not take the place of strategy”

Looking forward to all the people who are going to argue that Jim Mattis is a woke war college weenie https://t.co/N1vXWypJVZ

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) March 24, 2026

Another Midterm Omen: Retirements

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. 

Olivia Beavers at WSJ:

[Sam] Graves [R-TN] is among a wave of lawmakers leaving Congress after this term, with more than 50 House members announcing they won’t seek another term—recently hitting a record for a midterm election. About half of those members are seeking a different elected office.

As of this morning, 36 of 57 House retirees are Republicans. 

Some of the GOP retirees are retiring because of the prospect of losing their seats (e.g., Issa, a casualty of the CA gerrymander). But Graves and others have safe seats.  Why are they in the departure lounge?  One reason is that they expect their party to lose the majority, and they know it is unpleasant to serve in the House minority.

Corruption Update

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist.

Megan Lebowitz and Kyle Stewart at NBC:

Former special counsel Jack Smith's team had evidence that President Donald Trump had classified documents, including materials relevant to business interests, after he left office following his first term, according to a memo the Justice Department gave to Congress.

The memo, obtained by NBC News, summarizes what prosecutors were working on as of January 2023 related to an investigation of allegations that Trump mishandled classified documents.

“Trump had in his possession some highly sensitive documents — the type of documents that only presidents and officials with the most sensitive authority have,” the memo said. They included one document that was previously “accessible by only 6? people, including the president.”

“That document is one we will need,” prosecutors said in the memo.

Smith’s team also wrote, “Trump had many documents in his possession — so many and in so many different places that it is hard to fathom that he was not aware.”

The memo said Smith’s team believed Trump may have shown a classified map to other people on a flight to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, an event that the team says was witnessed by Susie Wiles, now Trump’s chief of staff.

Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, summarized the memo's content in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday, saying that the document included "damning evidence" about Trump's procurement of highly sensitive documents.

Aimee Picchi and Mary Cunningham at CBS:

Financial markets experts are raising concerns about possible insider trading after an unusual spike in oil futures trading only minutes before President Trump announced talks with Iran on Truth Social.

Mr. Trump's announcement, which he posted on social media shortly after 7 a.m. EST on Monday, caused oil prices to tumble and the Dow Jones Industrial Average to surge more than 1,000 points. The president also touted what he described as "productive" peace talks with Iran, providing relief to investors concerned about rising oil prices and their impact on inflation and economic growth.

The message amounted to a sudden shift from Mr. Trump's post on Saturday that threatened to "obliterate" Iran's power plants unless it reopened the Strait of Hormuz to ship traffic. That abrupt change, which caught investors by surprise, has drawn scrutiny over unusual trading activity just before Mr. Trump issued Monday's market-moving announcement.
"Massive spike"

In the minutes before Mr. Trump's Monday morning post, there was a spike in oil futures trading, according to Bloomberg News and the Financial Times. Between 6:49 a.m. and 6:50 a.m., about 6,200 Brent and West Texas Intermediate futures contracts changed hands, with a notional value of $580 million, according to the Financial Times' analysis of Bloomberg data.

The average trading level for the same time period over the previous five trading days was about 700 contracts, Bloomberg News reported.

Florida Specials

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. 

Khaleda Rahman at Newsweek:

President Donald Trump faced a bruising election night on Tuesday, as two Democrats flipped seats in reliably red Florida and the North Carolina Senate leader the president had endorsed for reelection conceded defeat in his primary race..

... 

The results serve as another sign of trouble for Republicans, who are embarking on a difficult campaign to keep control of both the House and Senate in November’s midterm elections. Historically, the party in power usually gives up seats in midterm elections. Trump has urged the GOP to redraw congressional maps across the country to give Republican candidates an advantage ahead of November's elections, although the effort that could end up backfiring.

Democrats have celebrated Tuesday’s victories in Florida as another signal that voters are turning against Trump and Republicans. They are the latest in a series of special election victories for Democrats across the country since the president returned to the White House more than a year ago

In Florida, Democrat Emily Gregory won a special election to represent the state’s 87th House district, flipping a seat that includes Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. The president carried the district by double digits in the 2024 election.

Trump had endorsed Gregory's Republican rival, Jon Maples. In a post on his Truth Social platform on Monday, he urged voters to turn out to vote, saying Maples was backed “by so many of my Palm Beach County friends.”

Also in Florida, Democrat Brian Nathan declared victory in a tight race to replace Republican Jay Collins in State Senate District 14, after Collins was tapped by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to serve as his lieutenant governor.

The win is a major upset in a Tampa-area district that Collins won by almost 10 percentage points in 2022 and where there are about 22,000 more registered Republican voters than Democrats.

The two seats are the 29th and 30th seats that Democrats have flipped from Republican control since Trump returned to office, Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, said in a statement to Newsweek.

 

Struggling

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments 

Sarah Fioroni at Gallup:

For the first time since Gallup began measuring the life evaluation of the American workforce, more U.S. workers are struggling in their lives (49%) than thriving (46%). This contrasts with 2022 and 2023, when the reverse was true, with the share of U.S. employees considered “thriving” staying in the low-to-mid 50s — a mark of relative resilience after pandemic disruptions. After staying steady between 57% and 60% from 2009 to 2019, the thriving rate among workers fell to 55% in 2020 before rebounding in 2021 then steadily decreasing after that.