A lesson for Trump on choosing the right battles

“Pick your battles wisely.” For parents, that’s a discipline we try to practice — and a lesson we try to teach our kids.

No one taught President Donald Trump.

In the budget he proposed last week, he would boost military spending by $54 billion. That’s a roughly 10 percent hike. True, it’s not unwise to have the most modern military in the world. To the contrary, it’s an imperative. But we’re reinforcing it to go into battle against whom? The Chinese, with their single secondhand rebuilt aircraft carrier? (We have 10.) Against Russia, with its 775,000-man military? (We have 1.5 million.)

Inarguably, we need both offensive and defensive capabilities, and the flexibility to fight in more than one war at once. But that’s precisely what we’ve been doing, and no hostile country has caught us off guard and attacked our homeland.

As my mama taught me, money doesn’t grow on trees. With a military budget that’s as big as the next six to nine nations combined (statistics vary), we already have enough.

Furthermore, Trump’s budget flies in the face of some very sage advice — to which I can attest from my many years covering news overseas — from his own secretary of defense, Gen. James Mattis, who appreciates the strategic value of foreign aid and diplomacy as a peaceful weapon against war. Mattis has said, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.” But Mattis wasted his breath. Cuts to the State Department come to 28 percent.

Anyway, our military fights battles overseas to protect our quality of life. Here at home we fight battles to improve it. Which the president’s budget would undercut.

Take, for example, the battle against sickness and disease. Trump would slash nearly $6 billion from the National Institutes of Health. That’s where most cancer drugs get their start. And heart disease, our leading cause of death? As the president of the American Heart Association put it when he saw the cuts, “You can save $6 billion today and spend $1 trillion down the road.”

Or the battle against poverty. Such as heating assistance for low-income families that in wintertime have to choose between heat and nutrition. And college opportunity grants, without which poor people stay stuck in low-income jobs. And Meals on Wheels for homebound seniors; one asked on CNN, “How else would I eat?” I ask, how much more poverty and homelessness can we handle? A congressman called these proposed cuts “draconian, careless and counterproductive.” And he’s a fellow Republican.

Then there’s the battle against pollution. Pollution is a bipartisan problem. The president proposes to make it worse, taking a truncheon to purer water and cleaner air and more efficient cars and finishing off Superfund sites around the country. And triggering an anti-science, smallminded stoppage of research into climate change.

For most of the president’s cuts, there is no alternative to replace them.

So maybe we should focus instead on the man himself, and the battles he picks, and I’ll begin with this advice: If, at the end of the budget process, Mr. President, you find a few discretionary bucks left over, spend them on a dictionary.

Maybe then you will learn that “wiretap” does not mean “a lot of different things,” as you claimed last week like a rat running from the poison. “Wiretap” means “wiretap.” Period.

And maybe you’ll learn that even if President Barack Obama had surveilled Trump Tower, that wouldn’t be “McCarthyism,” as you called it. McCarthyism is making mad accusations about opponents without a particle of proof.

Maybe you will even learn that the “alternative facts” which you and your staff revel in fabricating have an undebatable definition that any English dictionary will confirm: “fiction.”

You want to talk about fighting battles? The biggest battle we face is surviving the shameful priorities and appalling behavior of this president.