An ambitious opening bid is a basic tactic of negotiation, basic enough that Donald Trump (or his ghostwriter, at least) wrote about it in The Art of the Deal: “My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing … Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want.”

Trump’s draconian budget proposal has all the signs of a gambit designed to get what Trump, and his negotiating partners in Congress, really want, which is a slightly less draconian budget. So it’s cold comfort to its intended targets – the poor, the sick, many in rural red states Trump won – that the budget plan won’t pass in its current form. No president’s budget plan ever does. “Dead on arrival” is how John McCain described it, though his objection was that it does not shift enough money from welfare recipients to defense contractors.

The only good news about Trump's budget? It's unlikely to pass Read more

Make no mistake: Trump’s budget will be horrific no matter what form it takes in an eventual appropriations bill. Some of the highlights – these are things the White House sees fit to brag about – include cutting children’s health insurance, disability insurance, farm aid, food stamps, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program and the coup de grace: halving Medicaid spending by over $600bn.

This is a betrayal of Trump’s campaign promise, to working class voters who will bear the brunt of these cuts, not to touch Medicaid. It’s made possible by our lack of universal healthcare, instead of which we have a patchwork of targeted health programs for those who can’t or mostly don’t vote – children and poor people – and are thus politically easy to cut.

Congressional Republicans are already feigning shock at some of the more egregious cuts Trump has in mind, including money for cancer and Alzheimer’s research, and Meals on Wheels, calling them “a bridge too far”; elderly people, after all, actually do vote. Don’t be fooled, though. The same lawmakers fanning themselves and reaching for the smelling salts have been pushing the same austerity program for decades. Cutting Medicaid is something Paul Ryan said he’s been dreaming of since he was “drinking at a keg”, while Mitch McConnell has complained that Americans are “doing too good with food stamps, Social Security, and all the rest”. The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Endowment for the Arts have been Republican targets for elimination since the 80s.

Normally, presidents make a big dog-and-pony show to promote their budget proposals, or at least manage to be in the country at the time that it’s unveiled. The fact that Trump couldn’t be bothered to do so is either a reflection of his goldfish-like attention span, a realization of his toxic status in Washington or both.

Yet even in hobbled form, Trump is still useful to Republicans on the Hill simply because he allows them to push the same extremist policies they’ve always pushed and appear comparably less extreme. So they will stand up to him on farm subsidies while killing home energy and student loan subsidies, along with climate change research, literacy programs, teacher training, community services block grants, occupational safety and health programs, hazardous waste cleanup, and a host of programs for the poor.

Never mind that such cuts are indefensible not only from a moral standpoint but a fiscal one: that these welfare programs are growing at a slower rate than the economy as a whole, or that Trump’s budget projections are based on an obvious accounting error. It doesn’t even matter that the entire White House is increasingly looking like a mafia family caught in a Rico sting.

However long Trump has left in office before heading to tennis prison, or simply getting bored and resigning, Republicans in Congress will express their grave concern about these latest allegations and do exactly nothing, as long as he signs off on their tax cuts.

The truth is Republicans are better at this game than Democrats. They’re perfectly happy to have Trump play the bad cop, because they can assert their independence and still get what they want. Democrats consistently concede to the other side before they’ve even begun to negotiate.

Thus for all the 12-dimensional chess Obama was playing, he killed the public option before it was even on the table to pass a Republican healthcare bill that Republicans still hated.

Political genius Bill Clinton simply stole the Republican’s welfare reform plan from the outset. Today Republicans are set up to get their entire policy program, plus a permanently conservative supreme court, under the leadership of a man who can barely speak in complete sentences.

“The Trump budget” is a misnomer. Presidents don’t craft budgets, Congress does. But lawmakers will call it that, and reap the rewards, as long as he’s around to take the heat for it.