In a cutting opinion piece in Tuesday’s Washington Post, columnist Dana Milbank mockingly praises Donald Trump:

“For once,” Milbank writes, “President Trump spoke the truth,”

He quotes Trump, speaking Monday about his proposed federal budget for fiscal 2021.

“We’re doing a lot of things that are good, including waste and fraud. Tremendous waste and tremendous fraud,” the president said.

Not what he meant, perhaps, but what he actually said.

“No question about it!” Milbank exclaims. “Trump’s budget is a tremendous fraud — and it lays tremendous waste to his promises.”

Milbank then recalls Trump’s campaign vow to eliminate the federal debt during his presidency, pointing out that in fact the debt has grown by $3 trillion since Trump took office — and the new budget plan will add another $3.4 trillion to it by 2024, “by piling on $1-trillion-a-year budget deficits.”

And he ticks off specifics:

“Even as the elderly population swells, his budget calls for removing half a trillion dollars of funding from the Medicare program over 10 years … and tens of billions” from Social Security.

“In 2015, he promised not to touch Medicaid … Now he wants to cut it by $920 billlion.”

“He was going to give Americans health care “much better” than Obamacare. But he has proposed no such thing and now his budget calls for cutting spending on the program by $844 billion.”

As for Trump’s huge tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations — and his promise that the economy would grow by 4% or more to pay for them — that growth has in fact never reached 3% and the new budget optimistically projects 2.8% for this year.

“Yet the budget would also devote another $1.4 trillion to extending those tax cuts, primarily for the rich,” Milbank writes. “A tremendous fraud, indeed.”

There’s more — much more: big cuts for student loan forgiveness, food stamps, environmental protection and health services.

Milbank also takes a jab at Democratic presidential candidates, who, he writes “should be shouting this warning from the mountaintops. Instead they’re bickering over who has the purest form of Medicare-for-all.”

Milbank saves some actual good news for near the end of his column:

“Happily, Trump’s budget is going nowhere in Congress.”