Donald Trump’s dictator budget

This week, our president announced that he would like the nation’s defense budget, which already stands at $1 trillion, to be increased by $500 billion, or $600 billion. It’s hard to know which is the real number, because he changes the amounts whenever a new whim is making its way through his excellently-focused mind.

I refer to Donald Trump’ mind as excellently-focused, because he emphasizes it all the time. He has claimed to have “aced” a simple cognitive test that is regularly administered to aging adults by geriatric physicians. During an interview with four reporters from the New York Times on Thursday, Trump allowed them to listen in as he conversed on his speakerphone with Colombian President Gustavo Petro. Afterwards, Trump made a point of asking the Times reporters if they thought Joe Biden “could do that.” This conversation took place days after Trump called Petra an “illegal drug leader” and a “sick man” and warned that he might be kidnapped “next” after he had kidnapped Nicolas Maduro and his wife from their home in Caracas, Venezuela.

Trump is very determined these days. He is especially determined to bring the world to heel. He told the New York Times reporters, who must have been clutching the arms of their White House chairs in astonishment, that he doesn’t “need” international law. Asked if there were any limits on his powers over the world, Trump responded, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Trump currently has one trillion dollars in his defense budget – I guess these days he would call it his “war budget” since he and Hegseth have renamed the Department of Defense as the Department of War – to fund attacks he wants to carry out on various enemies such as Houthi rebels in Yemen, alleged nuclear facilities in Iran, the Islamic State in Somalia, and more recently, 36 so-called “drug boats” in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, and the country of Venezuela. Military Times reported on December 31 that since Trump took office last January, he has ordered 626 air strikes on targets that he did not want to exist anymore.

But Donald Trump has another budget – we’ll call it his dictator budget – that he has been using to bring to heel the citizens of the United States, most especially those living in states controlled by Democratic Party governors. He has not been spending money from this budget in Mississippi or Alabama or South Carolina or Arkansas. No, he has been spending it in Illinois and Minnesota and California and other blue states.

Trump’s dictator budget is the money appropriated in the “Big Beautiful Bill” passed last year as an increase to the budget of the Department of Homeland Security, which he is turning into his Domestic Department of War. $170 billion dollars was appropriated in what they called immigration and border enforcement funding. Let me tell you how much money that is. The country of Great Britain has a defense budget of $83 billion. France’s defense budget is $74 billion. Combined, those two European nations spend $13 billion less on their defense against foreign enemies than Donald Trump and his Republican Congress think needs to be spent in this country to do things like conduct an assault on an apartment building in Chicago and arrest 37 people without a warrant. Not one of those people was charged with a criminal offense, even though they were all detained in jail. Among those detained without warrants and not charged with a crime were several U.S. citizens, including one veteran of military service.

Trump’s dictator budget also funded the murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. His $170 billion dictator budget paid for the chaos shown in this photograph of the street on which an ICE agent fatally shot Good.

Do you see what is happening in this photo? American citizens are being assaulted by an ICE agent using something they are now calling “chemical irritants.” That incredibly stupid combat uniform and mask and bulletproof vest and helmet is being paid for with the $170 billion dictator budget.

Here is another photo taken just down the street outside a high school. It took three ICE agents to handcuff an American citizen who was standing on the street observing armed ICE agents as they invaded an American neighborhood. The man on the ground is a citizen of Minneapolis. He had a right to walk down that street and observe what was going on. This is what he got for exercising that right.

The Department of Homeland Security is seeking to hire 10,000 new ICE agents and 3,000 new Border Patrol agents. Their training and salaries and benefits, such as fully-paid health care and retirement benefits – will be paid with our tax dollars out of the $170 billion dictator budget. It’s like they are spending tax dollars to hire a private army to terrorize, assault, kneel on, spray “chemical irritants” on, arrest, and yes, kill the citizens of this country, including Renee Nicole Good.

According to USA Today, in November, DHS announced that they will be hiring thousands of private contractors as “skip tracers” whose job it will be to locate 1.5 million people by going through court records, utility bills, and employment information – all without a warrant. These so-called “skip-tracers” will be expected to provide DHS with photos of these people, their homes, and workplaces – all without a warrant. The private contractors will each be given 50,000 names at a time to investigate. So, without their knowledge that this is taking place, tens of thousands of American citizens and immigrants will be investigated and photographed and information about them will be gathered. We will not know what will be done with these photographs and information. All of this is a secret contained within the $170 billion dictator budget.

On Wednesday, Vice President Vance proudly told Fox News that the administration has 22,000 new agents and investigators already. He said these agents and investigators will be “going door to door” to carry out their investigations and arrests of immigrants.

Some of these investigations will be carried out in mass-arrest fashion, such as ICE did to the apartment building in Chicago, when they went through the building and broke down the doors of apartments and ransacked them and arrested the occupants and hand-cuffed them – all without presenting a single search or arrest warrant or identifying whether the occupants were citizens or not. They did this because they suspected that Tren de Aragua gang members “hung out” at the building.

No gang members were found in the building or charged with crimes or with belonging to a gang.

There is a new video tape today showing the killing of Renee Nicole Good. Apparently filmed by the ICE agent who killed her, it is terrible to watch. On the tape, you can hear her being ordered by one agent to get out of the car, and another agent to get out of here. So, she is being given conflicting orders in a very confusing situation.

Here is what Republican Congressman Wesley Hunt of Texas said on Newsmax about how American citizens should conduct themselves when confronted by one of the many thousands of ICE agents who have been hired with Trump’s $170 billion dictator budget: “The bottom line is this: When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life.”

Got that? Do what you’re told to do, or we will kill you.

This is not the way citizens of a democracy should have to go about their lives in an American city such as Chicago or Minneapolis or anywhere else for that matter. An entire new army is being hired and paid with our tax dollars to terrorize American citizens in their homes, on their streets, in their places of business, around their schools, wherever they walk or drive their cars.

This is no longer a democracy. It is a dictatorship. We are living every day in this country with an invading army in our midst. They wear military uniforms. They conceal their identities so we will not know who is throwing us to the ground and putting their knees in our backs and cuffing our hands. We will not know who is ordering us to get out of our cars, or ordering us to keep driving, as we go about our business on the streets of our own cities, within a few blocks of our own homes, as was the case with Renee Nicole Good.

This is a photograph (center) of one of the commanders of this new army, Greg Bovino, as he calmly observed the chaos on the street in Minneapolis immediately after one of his agents killed an American citizen in cold blood.

Notice that he is attired in military-style clothing. He is wearing a combat helmet and a bulletproof vest. Some sort of can of teargas or other “chemical irritant” is attached to his load-bearing web gear. He looks like he is playing soldier because he is.

This man, and his boss Kristi Noem, and her boss, Donald Trump, are taking our own money, $170 billion of it, and they are spending that money not to protect us, as our defense budget used to intended for, but to invade our cities and terrorize us as United States citizens. They are demanding that we comply with their orders, and they are telling us that if we don’t comply, they can kill us the same way they killed Renee Nicole Good.

Say her name. Remember this day. This is where we are, and this is what is happening in the United States of America on January 9, 2026.