On Sunday night, the New York Times reported that Donald Trump would soon announce plans to revamp the federal budget and start spending a lot more money on the Defense Department. On Monday morning, it was further revealed that Trump wants to increase military spending by $54 billion dollars for the upcoming fiscal year. Trump defended this plan in a speech, in which he claims that this budget will make America safe again, and then he got down to talking about winning.
Remember how his campaign rallies included claims that America would win so much, that we wouldn’t know what to do with all this winning? Roll it:
“We have to win. We have to start winning wars again. I have to say, when I was young, in high school and college, everybody used to say we never lost a war. We never lost a war. You remember, some of you were right there with me, you remember, America never lost … We never win and we don’t fight to win … We’ve either got to win or don’t fight it at all.”
Trump wasn’t even close to finished, and someone showed him “a chart”:
But where we are, 17 years, almost 17 years of fighting in the Middle East, we’re up — I saw a chart the other day as of about a month ago, $6 trillion we’ve spent in the Middle East. $6 trillion. And I want to tell you that’s just unacceptable and we’re nowhere. Actually, if you think about it, we’re less than nowhere. The Middle East is far worse than it was 16, 17 years ago, there’s not even a contest. So we’ve spent $6 trillion. We have a hornet’s nest. It’s a mess like you’ve never seen before. We’re nowhere so we’re going to straighten it out.
Money = winning?
Trump’s $54 billion figure would represent a 10% increase in defense spending (while making cuts to the EPA, State Department, foreign aid, and many social programs while leaving Social Security and Medicare intact). Some folks — particularly one fallen Navy SEAL’s father, who wants to know why Trump recently approved “boots on the ground” in Yemen — may be wary of his desire to rush in and bust chops all over the world. And in the end, the president will likely (as with his Muslim ban) tell the press that he was only fulfilling that campaign promise of “winning.”
Here’s a longer clip if you want to reflect upon Trump’s obsession on winning in full context. He wants to give troops the tools they need to succeed, but yeah, this is totally about winning.
Trump says that when he was in college, everyone said we never lost a war. And now, we don’t win anymore. (He was in college during Vietnam) pic.twitter.com/s7ycSr9sGl
— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) February 27, 2017
(Via New York Times & MSNBC)