By CYNTHIA ARBOR-MISER
January 1, 2026
In a bold, visionary move that has left fiscal hawks weeping into their spreadsheets and ethics professors considering a mid-career shift to forestry, President Donald J. Trump unveiled a new budget proposal that expertly addresses several national priorities at once. The plan, titled “Making America’s Ledger Great Again (And Also My Kids),” proposes a staggering $2 trillion increase in defense spending, a corresponding stratospheric rise in the national debt, and a subtle, artful program of ensuring that the financial streams flowing from these decisions somehow, inexplicably, find their way to entities bearing the Trump surname.
Administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not entirely sure which laws they might be skirting, described the budget as “a holistic ecosystem of prosperity.” The President himself was characteristically succinct. “We need the best missiles, the biggest ships, and the strongest debt,” he told a rally in Wilkes-Barre, PA, later adding, “Debt is just a number, but winning is a feeling. My family feels very winning right now.”
The elegance of the proposal lies in its interconnectedness. The $2 trillion defense surge will focus on next-generation technologies. A significant portion is earmarked for a new “Strategic Hospitality and Leisure Defense Initiative,” which will construct luxury bunkers at all domestic military installations. A source within the Pentagon confirmed that the sole contractor for the marble flooring and gold-plated faucets in these bunkers is a recently formed subsidiary of the Trump Organization. “It’s about morale,” the source explained. “If a general is going to oversee a nuclear exchange, he should do it from a steam room with excellent water pressure.”
Simultaneously, the budget projects the national debt—that pesky accounting artifact previous administrations mistakenly concerned themselves with—to balloon to levels not seen since we last printed money to pay off a war bond. When asked about this, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, from the deck of a yacht he was auditing for a friend, noted, “The bond market will adjust. Interest rates are a suggestion. The real currency is confidence, and the President has plenty of it.”
The family enrichment component, while not explicitly listed in the 4,000-page budget document, is understood to operate on a quantum level: you don’t observe it directly, but you feel its effects. For instance, the budget allocates $500 billion for “Middle East Stability Operations.” Coincidentally, this comes just weeks after a $2 billion investment fund, operated by the ever-astute Jared Kushner, received a miraculous infusion of capital from a Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth board that remains “very optimistic about American defense posture.”
Furthermore, a new “Veterans’ Luxury Golf Therapeutic Program” will provide every service member with a complimentary membership to a Trump-branded golf course, billed to the Department of Veterans Affairs at “premium, non-negotiable, patriotic rates.” “It’s therapy,” said a White House statement. “Swinging a club on hallowed, Trump-owned ground is known to cure PTSD, poor financial judgment, and any lingering respect for the Emoluments Clause.”
Democrats, in a shocking display of humorless bean-counting, called the proposal “a kleptocratic fever dream wrapped in a flag.” Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) tweeted, “He’s literally funding his family’s next century of luxury with a debt our grandchildren will pay, all while pretending it’s for ‘the troops.’ It’s so blatant it’s almost artistic.”
She misses the point. This is not mere corruption; it is synergy. The defense contractors win. The President’s family wins. The debt, freed from the shackles of societal expectation, gets to be truly, unprecedentedly huge. And the American people? They win the profound psychological satisfaction of knowing their commander in chief is, as always, thinking ahead—primarily about which of his properties could use a new, taxpayer-funded ballroom.
It’s a full-circle moment of patriotic finance. The money leaves the Treasury, performs a dazzling, high-flying loop-de-loop through the defense-industrial complex, lightly brushes the vaults of a few adored allies, and lands, as if by magic—or perhaps by meticulously crafted licensing agreement—in a gleaming, gold-‘T’-embossed purse.
A masterclass, indeed. The textbooks will have to be rewritten. Or, more likely, printed by a newly formed publishing house leased from the Trump Tower basement.
