One seeks in vain for any strategy, logic, or consistency in the actions of the Trump administration. Only three guiding principles seem to have emerged: 1) Do the opposite of anything Obama did or Hillary would have done (or at least say you are), 2) break any promise made during the course of the campaign, and 3) betray especially the populist, older, white, blue-collar, working-class voters who provided the electoral edge that won the presidency for you.

Case in point, the budget proposal that is now dead on arrival in Congress because its members do not have a death wish. Trump promised to provide help for the constituency cited above by brining jobs back, but also by using the government to provide help in combating the ravages of an opioid epidemic that has hit economically disadvantaged regions hard. He also promised the same folks to preserve their safety net of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and to generally ameliorate their economic woes. So what does he do?

He turns over the design of he budget to OMB chief Mick Mulvaney, a Freedom Caucus, anti-government zealot who announces the budget by saying it doesn’t “measure compassion by the number of programs or the number of people on those programs, but by the number of people we help get off of those programs.” How? By eliminating the programs. Feel better now, people in need?

He said the Trump budget’s focus was not on compassion for recipients of government programs but on compassion for taxpayers, indicated by how many programs they won’t have to pay for. In short, it is an extreme version of the usual Republican attempt to give tax breaks to fat cats and corporations at the expense of everybody else, particularly those under the most economic duress.

So the budget proposes cutting $1 trillion in social programs in exchange for Social Darwinism. The savings would fund tax cuts for people in Trump’s bracket. All government departments other than Defense would face cuts of up to 40% in their budgets.

Those impacted disproportionately would be those populist Trump voters. Medicaid, the government health programs for the poor would be cut by $600 billion. Mulvaney says this would replace dependency with the dignity of work. But half of Medicaid recipients are already working and many of the rest are disabled or too sick to work or unable to find a job, exactly the kind of people Trump promised to help in West Virginia and Michigan.

The earned income tax credit and child credit for poor families would be slashed. So would farm subsidies, school lunches, student loans and a whopping $200 billion from food stamps that help feed 44 million people. Luckily for Trump, most of those are children so they can’t vote to throw out the people who aim to take bread out of their mouths.

The list of programs that protect people that Mulvaney proposes to cut goes on and on, including the Centers for Disease Control, The National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration. And in a real insight into the Mulvaney mindset, he proposes huge cuts to the Social Security program for people who are disabled. Why? Because by taking away the financial crutch for the disabled people “you can help people take charge of their own lives again.” In short, he expects the disabled to stand up on their own two feet, even if they haven’t got two feet.

Not only is the Mulvaney budget callously designed to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted, it is also either incompetent or a con game, as became clear shortly after it was released. The Management and Budget director apparently can’t do math, which would seem like a needed skill in his job, because he used the supposed savings from his draconian program cuts twice — first to balance the budget, and a second time to pay for those tax cuts for the superrich.

This is innovative thinking. I plan next month to use my house payment not just to pay he bank, but also to fund a vacation. I would have had a lot more fun in life if I’d known sooner that you can spend the same money twice. It is reminiscent of Reagan’s magic asterisk which proposed to sidestep a huge budget shortfall by means of revenues to be discovered later.

And then there’s the fact that we are back to same trickle-down, supply-side nonsense of Republican fantasy. Supposedly, the giant tax cuts for the rich are going to juice the economy so thoroughly that it will grow by 4% a year instead of the 2% every reputable analyst predicts. And that effervescent growth will translate into jobs for all hose people who no longer have government programs to rely on. So the programs are no longer necessary. See?

Reagan tried this nostrum, that George H.W Bush correctly characterized as voodoo economics. So did George W. Bush and more recently Gov. Sam Brownback in Kansas. Guess what, all it created was greater inequality and budget deficits as far as the eye could see. Yes, the rich may have invested their windfall, but not in West Virginia coal mines or Michigan auto plants, but in Philippine furniture factories or Chinese electronic assembly plants or Indian call centers. The result: deepening poverty for the poor, bigger yachts for the rich.

Will the hard-times voters who put Trump in power notice that their obsolete jobs aren’t coming back and that their safety net is being stolen away, that the tax cuts are still promised, but not for them? Rank and file Republican office holders get it. They recoiled in horror from this budget atrocity because they want to be re-elected and fear rightly that their opponents will hang the Trump-Mulvaney budget around their necks. You can almost see the TV ads already, with spooky music and black-and-white visuals of hungry children, dispossessed disabled people, and jobless workers deprived of a safety net. And the theme song of this attack won’t be “Happy Days Are Here Again.”