After President Donald Trump’s reckless bombing of three nuclear facilities in Iran last June, commentators were quick to draw parallels with George W. Bush’s calamitous invasion of Iraq in 2003, once described by Trump as possibly “the worst decision” in presidential history. After initially capturing the GOP a decade ago by railing against neoconservatives and the Bush administration for lying about “weapons of mass destruction” to justify their invasion, Trump, now in power, revealed himself to be the “ultimate neocon.”

Not long after, the president signed the “Big Beautiful Bill” into law, which continued the decades-long trend of Republicans slashing taxes for the rich and blowing up the federal deficit. In addition to locking in the 2017 tax cuts, the bill also transformed federal spending priorities by gutting social programs for the poor and funneling vast sums into the administration’s fledgling police state. Over the next decade, millions of poor Americans will lose their health insurance and access to food aid due to more than $1 trillion in spending cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). At the same time, $325 billion of public money will flow into the administration’s mass deportation campaign and military buildup.

This profligate spending on America’s militarization, coupled with tax cuts for the rich and “preemptive” strikes on Iran, laid bare just how little US conservatism has actually changed in the era of Trump. Samuel Moyn observed that Trump had revealed himself to be a “politician of American continuity” rather than a harbinger of change. “His rise, like that of a reawakened left, indicated that America was ready to move on from its long era of neoliberalism and neoconservatism,” Moyn wrote. But in office, Trump has “blocked the exits by doubling down on both.”