This analysis came out earlier this month, and it’s the mother of all wake-up calls. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” would appropriate $200 billion to ICE, which the Cato Institute has called an “unimaginable sum.” Some relevant quotes:
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the bill will direct an astounding $168 billion of the budget to immigration and border law enforcement, and there is even more for agencies that indirectly support immigration law enforcement.
The $168 billion is, by itself, an unimaginable sum. Without H.R. 1, Congress had already appropriated twice as much money to America’s border police as all other federal law enforcement combined. In FY 2025, immigration and border enforcement accounted for at least two-thirds of all federal law enforcement.
In FY 2025—again, before H.R. 1—Congress allocated nearly $34 billion to immigration and border enforcement agencies. That’s 36 times more than what is provided for tax and financial crimes enforcement (IRS-Treasury), 21 times more than funding for firearms enforcement (ATF), 13 times more than drug enforcement (DEA), and 8 times more than the FBI budget to enforce effectively everything else. The level of border police spending is already so extreme that it has swamped nearly all other criminal law enforcement priorities for the federal government.
The House plans to distort this wildly out-of-whack law enforcement system beyond recognition. H.R. 1 appropriates $168 billion to agencies whose primary purpose is immigration enforcement. It adds $1.2 billion to all other law enforcement for the Secret Service. This sum comes on top of the $33 billion, meaning that if this bill passes, about $200 billion will be made available for immigration enforcement starting in FY 2025.
$200 billion dollars is equivalent to 1/5th of our entire military budget ($960 billion). It’s more than Russia’s entire military spending in 2024 ($149 billion). To say that Trump would be creating a 7th branch of the military operating on US soil would be neither an overstatement nor a conspiracy theory.
For context, this article was published by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank originally founded by Charles Koch (among others). The fact that these guys are ringing the alarm bell should be a warning unto itself. You can read the full text of the bill (H.R. 1) here.
If your meaning is that Cato institute somehow laid the path for Trump to come to power, then I’d say that from the outside it looks like the liberal-centrist Democratic Party made much more of that, and also from the outside it looks like the consequences of all actions seem to be, in this case, just how they’d evaluate those, and also it wouldn’t seem clear why would you even claim it.
See, being against people\things you consider “good” is not supporting people\things you consider “bad” any more than you yourself are doing that.
It doesn’t only refer to those laying the path, but also to those that enable and make alliances with fascists because it’s the convenient thing to do or some of the goals align. E.g. our centrist or rather formally centrist party is sometimes referred as that because they shift the discussion to the right and enact anti-social policies that drive people to the extremist parties though they don’t coalise.
OK, then I’m not sure if it’s even possible to see a society most of politics in which weren’t “stirrup holders”.
I’d say the current Spanish government is pretty progressive, at least from what I can tell