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ronald reagan
A Hollow Song For a Hollow President
Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" promotes a version of patriotism that gets reduced to signing a blank check for whatever our leaders choose to do, but his isn't the sole patriotic ballad to chose from.
Jul 02, 2026
After musician after musician pulled out from President Donald Trump’s “Freedom 250” concert, he was left with Lee Greenwood, an opera tenor, a couple of military bands, and Kash Patel’s girlfriend. The anthem that made Greenwood a star, “God Bless the USA,” was written in 1985 during the height of the Cold War. It begins with the specter of loss—“If tomorrow—all the things were gone, I’d worked for all my life/ And I had to start all over with my children and my wife.” Then the wounds disappear before they’re felt: “I’d thank my lucky stars to be living here today/ Because the flag still stands for freedom and they can’t take that away.”
Ronald Reagan made the song his campaign theme while launching a new age of American inequality by systematically busting unions and cutting taxes for the wealthiest. Greenwood treats layoffs and the resulting toll on ordinary lives as a mere inconvenience. As the refrain shifts from violins and a church organ to a military march, he repeats, “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free/ And I won’t forget the men who died who gave that right to me.”
Honoring those who died resonates powerfully. Those who risk taking bullets to defend our country deserve respect for their service and sacrifice. Yet this gives us no special grace over citizens of other lands. And doesn’t answer the question of whether or not it was necessary to put them in harms way to begin with. Because Greenwood says nothing about what freedom might demand of us, it becomes just an empty phrase, blessing all that our leaders may do, no matter how arrogant or destructive.
We were defending freedom in this view, when supporting dictators from Chile’s Augusto Pinochet to the Iranian Shah whose brutal rule laid the groundwork for the current theocracy and the war of choice that we hope has now finally ended. We’re supposedly defending freedom now as Trump cozies up to dictators like Russia's Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan, and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, and while Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents grab innocent people off America’s streets. When Greenwood sings, “There ain’t no doubt I love this land. God Bless the USA,” he never suggests what qualities of justice would redeem the love he declaims.
Hard as it is, we’re stronger for engaging the difficult questions about who we’ve been as a country and who we want to be.
Greenwood wrote the song after we invaded the 95,000-person country of Grenada, wanting to reflect “the spirit of America being proud.” Reagan made it his campaign theme, and Greenwood has been singing it at Republican rallies and conventions ever since. Trump calls it “the greatest hit of all time” and sold a “God Bless the USA Bible,” (printed in China) that contains the song. Because Greenwood says that just living in America makes us free, his version of patriotism gets reduced to signing a blank check for whatever our leaders choose to do. It’s a perfect match for this or any president who seeks to erase all limits on their power.
But Greenwood’s isn’t the sole patriotic ballad to choose from. The late Waylon Jennings’ “America” reached No. 6 on the charts the year “God Bless the USA” first came out. Written by Sammy Johns, the song affirms connection to native soil, as Jennings repeats, “America, America,” slowly and tenderly as if to a woman he loves; then admits, softly, “You’ve become a habit to me.” But he also makes tough demands—recounting his own history as an Anglo yeoman “from down round Tennessee,” then continuing, “But my brothers/ Are all black and white/ Yellow too/ And the red man is right/ To expect a little from you/ Promise and then follow through/ America.”
In a similar vein, “America the Beautiful” writer Katherine Lee Bates celebrated “purple mountain majesties,” but actively opposed America’s imperial adventures, so added lines like “God mend thine every flaw/Confirm thy soul in self-control/Thy liberty in law!” Bruce Springsteen’s whole career has been about honoring the courage and dignity of ordinary Americans, from “The Promised Land” celebrating those with “dreams that break your heart,” to “The Rising’s” portrait of 9/11 firefighters, to the “Streets of Minneapolis” chorus, “Singing through the bloody mist, we’ll take our stand for this land.”
Hard as it is, we’re stronger for engaging the difficult questions about who we’ve been as a country and who we want to be. Patriotic ballads don’t have to be political manifestos. But the best celebrate our diverse and contradictory land and acknowledge that true greatness does not flow like automatic grace. Rather, it’s fulfilled through honoring common responsibility and connection.
With democracy profoundly threatened, we need true patriotism more than ever. We can choose a patriotism of blind adulation. Or we can embrace the songs that demand the most of us.
An earlier version of this piece appeared in The Fulcrum.
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‘I Worked All Day and Can’t Feed My Family’: Mamdani Offers 9 Words More Terrifying Than Ronald Reagan’s
"It's not just that government can help, it's that government must help and our government will help."
May 18, 2026
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Monday delivered a rebuttal to former Republican President Ronald Reagan's infamous quote about "the nine most terrifying words in the English language."
During an event announcing the location of a second city-run grocery store, Mamdani recalled Reagan claiming in 1986 that the scariest words in the English language were "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
"It's a good quote, but I disagree," Mamdani said. "I think nine more terrifying words are actually, 'I worked all day and can't feed my family.' We are going to use the power of government to lower prices and make it easier for New Yorkers to put food on the table."
Mayor Zohran Mamdani mocks Ronald Reagan’s infamous quote.
“I can think of nine words more terrifying than ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help…’”
“I worked all day and can’t feed my family.” pic.twitter.com/ZteyFvA5Lg
— Jacobin (@jacobin) May 18, 2026
The mayor added that "when government understands its purpose as serving the very working people that it has left behind time and again, it can make a difference in the most pressing struggles facing our city today."
"It's not just that government can help," Mamdani emphasized, "it's that government must help and our government will help."
In an announcement, Mamdani revealed that the city is planning to open a 20,000-square-foot grocery store in the Peninusla development in the Bronx by the end of next year. This marks the second announced location for a city-run grocery store, following an earlier announcement for a planned store in East Harlem that is set to open by 2029.
"Making sure every New Yorker can buy fresh, affordable groceries in their own neighborhood is a key part of our affordability agenda," Mamdani said. "We are proud to begin this work in the South Bronx and remain committed to opening a store in every borough before the end of our first term.”
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It's No Accident That Trump's Iran War Steals Money From Healthcare and Education
Trump is currently asking for a $1.5 trillion military budget—a 64% increase in military spending since last year—which provides the budgetary pressure needed to justify gutting necessary programs that have been on the books for decades.
Apr 16, 2026
Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, spoke candidly years ago about why Republicans like tax cuts so much. In his 1986 book, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, he confided that tax cuts served the purpose of creating budget deficits that could then be used to justify spending cuts on government programs. Typically, administrations only cut spending for a program if it’s no longer necessary, and the resultant surplus may then be used as a tax cut to stimulate the economy. However, Stockman turned this on its head by using the tax cuts to create a budgetary crisis that would then require cuts in spending regardless of whether the programs were necessary or not.
In other words, Stockman used tax cuts to create a revenue problem that the Reagan administration could then mask as a spending problem. This is known as “starving the beast.” The administration starves the beast—important government services—of important tax revenues in order to slash government spending.
Stockman himself admitted the failure of this strategy since budget deficits during the Reagan administration did not bring down public spending in a meaningful way. This failure, however, didn’t stop the next generation of conservatives from making it a key part of their larger political project. In 2001 and 2003, for instance, George W. Bush pushed through massive tax cuts meant to impose a “fiscal straitjacket” on Congress. This then prompted Bush’s Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 to gut government programs.
Republican lawmakers attempted this again after they took control of the House of Representatives during the Obama administration in 2010. At the time, the US economy was struggling through the Great Recession, which congressional Republicans blamed on government profligacy and “out of control spending.” Not only did they hold the debt ceiling hostage to prevent future spending, but they urged more tax cuts to stimulate the economy. In general, starving the beast has become a more common, and outright underhanded, stratagem by which lawmakers have gone about cutting federal spending.
What happens when conservative lawmakers want to cut more government spending in healthcare or education? Will they manufacture a national security crisis to justify cuts in those social programs?
This strategy has also functioned as a form of class politics: Wealthy elites are often the main beneficiaries of the tax cuts financed by cuts in social services on which the average American is more likely to depend. For instance, Reagan’s 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act slashed top marginal tax rates from 70% to 50%, a rate that only the top 2% of Americans paid (those rates dropped even further to 28% in 1986). This cut was largely paid for with reductions in Aid to Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, Medicaid funding, student loans, and other social services. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 served the same agenda. According to research by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the richest 20% received 65% of the benefits of those tax cuts, while the top 5% received 38%. Spending was then cut under the Deficit Reduction Act by targeting Medicaid, Medicare, the Migrant and Season Farmworkers Program, literacy programs, and others.
The American public is now far more aware of who has, and who has not, benefited from cuts in taxes and spending, and public opinion makes it harder for lawmakers to starve the beast. New polling shows that only 19% of Americans support the idea of cutting taxes on the wealthy, while 58% say the wealthy should be paying more (this number rises to 63% when asked about large businesses and corporations). At the same time, the majority of Americans want the government to maintain spending on the kinds of programs that are usually targeted, such as Medicaid and food stamps, medical and cancer research, federal childcare programs, or the arts in public schools. In other words, Republican lawmakers are going to have a harder time gutting these programs by further cutting top marginal tax rates.
That is why they are finding new ways to starve the beast. The latest strategy has been to leverage the heavy cost of national security issues.
Nowhere is this more evident than through the US and Israel’s joint war with Iran. The bombing of Iran has proven to be even more expensive than the initial stages of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with the daily burn rate averaging around $1-2 billion a day. Shortly after launching the war in late February, President Donald Trump sought an additional $200 billion from Congress to fund it. The GOP is now using that price tag to plan massive cuts to important government programs.
In early April, for instance, Republicans proposed a reconciliation bill they claim would save $30 billion but would also drive up the out-of-pocket premium costs and increase the number of people without health insurance. Later that week, Trump candidly spoke of his intentions to slash government spending against the backdrop of a budgetary crisis caused by the war:
We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people, we’re fighting wars […] Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal [level]. 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.
Trump’s claim that the United States can’t afford these programs are patently false. Programs like Medicare and Medicaid are planned spending that are not responsible for budget deficits.
However, the president’s comments make sense when contextualized against his longer-term plans to rein in federal spending. Through the creation of DOGE, Trump attempted to usher in an era of “government efficiency,” which included sharp reductions in several programs including Medicare and Medicaid. Although technically still operational, DOGE is largely seen as a failure as it never achieved its goal of major spending cuts (in fact, government spending increased 6% in 2025).
The Iran war can complete the job that DOGE couldn’t. Trump is currently asking for a $1.5 trillion military budget—a 64% increase in military spending since last year—which provides the budgetary pressure needed to justify gutting necessary programs that have been on the books for decades. In doing so, Trump is essentially reviving the starve-the-beast strategy by fitting it into a large military project.
Although the strategy to starve the beast has changed, the class politics remains the same. Those affected will be those most reliant on programs designed to provide healthcare, education, and food. However, in this case the consequence are no longer restricted to the American taxpayer. The increase in military expenditures will be used to inflict harm upon vulnerable populations abroad. The strikes in Iran have already killed thousands of people and displaced over a million civilians.
The horrifying reality is that this carries the very real danger of becoming a common finance strategy. What happens when conservative lawmakers want to cut more government spending in healthcare or education? Will they manufacture a national security crisis to justify cuts in those social programs? Trump’s war in Iran establishes just such a dangerous precedent. For this reason, the American people must realize that their livelihood at home requires placing greater controls on what a president can do abroad.
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