- Joined
- Mar 7, 2018
- Messages
- 62,566
- Reaction score
- 19,324
- Location
- Lower Mainland of BC
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Centrist
From The Intelligencer
Donald Trump’s governing agenda has diverged from his campaign rhetoric in myriad ways. On the stump in 2016, the mogul accused the Saudi government of orchestrating the September 11 attacks; in office, he has fought to preserve the House of Saud’s inalienable right to incinerate Yemeni children with American-made munitions. The “populist” insurgent promised universal health care; the Republican president tried to throw 14 million Americans off of Medicaid.
But Trump’s biggest break with his own 2016 primary-era iconoclasm may be on matters of defense. At a debate in December 2015, Trump decried America’s wars in the Middle East as “a tremendous disservice to humanity,” and suggested that he would seek to rebalance the federal budget away from military adventures overseas, and toward domestic infrastructure. “We’ve spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that, frankly, if they were there and if we could have spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems — our airports and all the other problems we have — we would have been a lot better off,” Trump argued.
The president still indulges this quasi-isolationist streak from time to time. He will occasionally call on America’s allies to start shouldering the burdens of their own defense, or order a full-scale withdrawal of U.S. troops from a foreign conflict (before allowing his advisers to overrule him). But while these performative tantrums loom large in media discourse about the Trump presidency, they are utterly unrepresentative of the administration’s broader policy. The candidate who argued that America had overinvested in military endeavors and underinvested in its cities became a president whose budgets called for financing massive increases in defense spending with cuts to domestic infrastructure. When Congress refused to make this trade-off —opting to increase spending on both the Pentagon and domestic initiatives — Trump (briefly) threatened to shut down the government until his “guns not butter” budget was passed. Meanwhile, the president expanded nearly every overseas intervention he inherited.
Trump has made little effort to rationalize the apparent dissonance between his avowed skepticism of imperial overreach and demonstrable enthusiasm for expanding the reach of American military power. But he also hasn’t quite unlearned his “populist,” paleoconservative talking points. Thus, when Trump gave an interview to CNBC’s Squawk Box Monday morning, he managed to argue that the United States could not afford to cut defense spending by a penny — and that it was outrageous how much the U.S. spends on defense — in the course of answering a single question.
COMMENT:-
I can hardly wait to hear the hosannas in praise of Mr. Trump's inspired budget plan that will save money by not cutting expenditures.
Is his next huge fiscal triumph going to be the total elimination of the "income tax" (which will be replaced with a "patriotic national patriotic investment and patriotic operations patriotic funding patriotic levy based on ability to be required to pay and the ability to prosecute for failing to pay").
Trump: U.S. Defense Spending Is Too High — But Must Not Be Cut
Donald Trump’s governing agenda has diverged from his campaign rhetoric in myriad ways. On the stump in 2016, the mogul accused the Saudi government of orchestrating the September 11 attacks; in office, he has fought to preserve the House of Saud’s inalienable right to incinerate Yemeni children with American-made munitions. The “populist” insurgent promised universal health care; the Republican president tried to throw 14 million Americans off of Medicaid.
But Trump’s biggest break with his own 2016 primary-era iconoclasm may be on matters of defense. At a debate in December 2015, Trump decried America’s wars in the Middle East as “a tremendous disservice to humanity,” and suggested that he would seek to rebalance the federal budget away from military adventures overseas, and toward domestic infrastructure. “We’ve spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that, frankly, if they were there and if we could have spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems — our airports and all the other problems we have — we would have been a lot better off,” Trump argued.
The president still indulges this quasi-isolationist streak from time to time. He will occasionally call on America’s allies to start shouldering the burdens of their own defense, or order a full-scale withdrawal of U.S. troops from a foreign conflict (before allowing his advisers to overrule him). But while these performative tantrums loom large in media discourse about the Trump presidency, they are utterly unrepresentative of the administration’s broader policy. The candidate who argued that America had overinvested in military endeavors and underinvested in its cities became a president whose budgets called for financing massive increases in defense spending with cuts to domestic infrastructure. When Congress refused to make this trade-off —opting to increase spending on both the Pentagon and domestic initiatives — Trump (briefly) threatened to shut down the government until his “guns not butter” budget was passed. Meanwhile, the president expanded nearly every overseas intervention he inherited.
Trump has made little effort to rationalize the apparent dissonance between his avowed skepticism of imperial overreach and demonstrable enthusiasm for expanding the reach of American military power. But he also hasn’t quite unlearned his “populist,” paleoconservative talking points. Thus, when Trump gave an interview to CNBC’s Squawk Box Monday morning, he managed to argue that the United States could not afford to cut defense spending by a penny — and that it was outrageous how much the U.S. spends on defense — in the course of answering a single question.
COMMENT:-
I can hardly wait to hear the hosannas in praise of Mr. Trump's inspired budget plan that will save money by not cutting expenditures.
Is his next huge fiscal triumph going to be the total elimination of the "income tax" (which will be replaced with a "patriotic national patriotic investment and patriotic operations patriotic funding patriotic levy based on ability to be required to pay and the ability to prosecute for failing to pay").
