Donald Trump’s latest budget proposal does not shrink the American welfare state. It beheads it. The proposal cuts $266 billion from Medicare, $213 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and billions more from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, Medicaid, and regional-development agencies like the Denali Commission and the Delta Regional Authority over the next decade. It would repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with the skeletal Graham-Cassidy bill. If it is implemented in its current form, Trump’s budget will all but strip America’s most vulnerable of access to affordable health care, food stamps, and job training.

Welfare cuts are a predictable priority for Trump, whose first budget proposed similarly drastic cuts to social spending. The president packed his cabinet with millionaires and billionaires: It follows that the policies his government produces are good for people who already have money—and bad for people who do not. Official hostility toward the poor is not a bug but a feature for the Trump administration; at times, that hostility even seems to be its raison d’être. Monday’s budget only truly deviates from norms in one respect: It raises the federal deficit by more than $7 trillion over the next ten years.

Republicans oppose the very notion of welfare. It is this, and not deficit reduction, that truly animates Republican policy.

Strange move for a Republican president? Not really. Congressional Republicans had already paved the way for Trump. On Friday, Senate Republicans and Democrats reached a bipartisan spending agreement that did not reduce federal deficits. “Now we have Republicans hand in hand with Democrats offering us trillion-dollar deficits,” Senator Rand Paul complained mid-filibuster. “I can’t in all honesty look the other way.” Paul now seems like an outlier: His colleagues had little trouble abandoning the deficit, and their decision officially renders the party’s priorities transparent.

“Even under the weird linguistic conventions of American conservative politics where deficits caused by tax cuts don’t count as real deficits, today’s budget deal—a big, multi-billion dollar increase in military spending ‘offset’ by a nearly-as-large increase in non-military spending — gives up the game entirely,” Matt Yglesias wrote for Vox last Wednesday. “They don’t care, on any level, about the size of the federal budget deficit.” Trump’s budget affirms this conclusion. It also answers an implicit question: If Republicans don’t care about the deficit, what do they care about?

Trump is a useful megaphone, bluntly amplifying the beliefs his party has had a tendency to dress in more understated and graceful language. “Spending cuts” always mean “welfare cuts”; welfare reduction is in the party’s DNA. Understanding this does not require one to reduce the Republican Party to an entity motivated by simple greed, though greed is certainly an influence. For ideological reasons, Republicans oppose the very notion of welfare. It is this, and not deficit reduction, that truly animates Republican policy.