President Trump wounded himself when his administration announced the Department of Education would be cutting $17.6 million in funding for the Special Olympics. He was forced to reverse the decision after 24 hours of horrible headlines.
In time elapsed between Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s announcement and Trump’s declaration that he “overr[ode] my people,” senators from both parties revolted, with House Appropriations subcommittee Chairman Roy Blunt, R-Mo., directly contradicting the administration outright. The brouhaha was fodder for the news networks that had been hardest hit by the non-bombshell of the Mueller report. You could even say they “seized” upon it.
In principle, it makes sense to take away $17.6 million from a private nonprofit that already receives more than $133 million in private revenue. But politics doesn’t occur in a vacuum, and the Republican Party hasn’t practiced what it’s preached in decades. Even as they talk irresponsibly about expanding Social Security — a program already headed for insolvency — to cover parental leave, they go for the jugular when the opportunity arises to cut something politically popular.
Tax cuts are fine and dandy, but you need your veggies before dessert, and slashing funding to an organization that helps the most marginalized and disdained demographic in American life while senators spin impossible budget math to make taxpayers spend more on bad bills and border security without asylum reform is just cruel, optically speaking and in practice.
Trump accidentally shivs his own press coverage every other day. Just earlier this week he bragged that Republicans, after lying for nine years that they would repeal and replace Obamacare, would become the party of healthcare. But this Special Olympics fracas truly exemplified the current crisis plaguing the Republican Party that refuses to mess up a news cycle in the name of “fiscal responsibility” while abandoning it entirely in practice.
