Those of us who have memories longer than a goldfish know that President Donald Trump’s promise of a record-breaking $1 trillion defense budget for next year undercuts his promise to run a leaner federal government. It’s also an odd promise from “the ultimate peace president” who seemingly covets a Nobel Prize. It appears that the administration deploys “efficiency” and “peace” as diversionary rhetoric to obscure our president’s fixation on power and militarism.
We don’t have details on the defense budget yet, as the federal budget rollout is expected in May. But the details aren’t the point. “Nobody’s seen anything like it,” Trump told reporters Monday. “We have to build our military, and we’re very cost-conscious, but the military is something that we have to build. And we have to be strong because you’ve got a lot of bad forces out there now.”
Trump, much like his predecessors in both parties, sees extraordinary defense spending as exempt from typical considerations of efficiency.
Trump most likely chose the number — $1 trillion — because it is big, eye-catching and record-breaking. That would make sense for an administration more concerned with optics than policy execution. But suggesting a $1 trillion Pentagon budget also underscores that Trump, much like his predecessors in both parties, sees extraordinary defense spending as exempt from typical considerations of efficiency and as something that’s necessary for the maintenance of empire.
As DOGE has taken a chain saw to one federal agency after another, defense-related agencies have gone relatively unscathed. In March, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called for the termination of contracts, programs and grants that amounted to less than 0.07% of the Pentagon budget. Julia Gledhill, a research associate for the Stimson Center, a defense think tank, described the cuts as “a performative appeal to the American people” and as “nibbling at the edges of the Pentagon budget to shore up more funding for the president’s misguided priorities.”
Thanks to both parties, the defense budget is already unfathomably bloated. The government watchdog Public Citizen noted last year that the 2023 defense budget constituted more “than the spending of the next 9 countries [with the largest military spending in the world] combined and makes up 37% of global military spending, with the U.S. spending 3x more on its military than China and 8x more than Russia.” A trillion-dollar budget would mark a nearly 12% increase from current spending levels. What on Earth is the extra money needed for? Trump’s odious military parade that he’s fantasized about for years could possibly come to fruition this year — but that would most likely cost a fraction of the proposed budget increase, so that can’t explain it. More relevant are Trump’s hawkish tendencies. They’re different from those of most of his recent predecessors, but he is nonetheless still trigger-happy. During his first presidential campaign, Trump was a strident critic of the forever wars spawned by the so-called War on Terror, which was a welcome departure from both parties. And to his credit, he did set in motion the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Yet he has chosen to use his first months in office during this term to thump his chest and lay out a baldly imperialistic vision: seizing the Panama Canal, taking over Greenland, taking steps to potentially use military force against Mexico, insinuating that Canada, a sovereign nation, is potential territory to conquer. And his administration’s leaked Signal chat illustrated how his decision to bomb Yemen reflected an impulse to continue playing the role of the world’s policeman. Trump is no dove. Nor is he particularly interested in saving taxpayers’ money or using more of it to help people in need. To the contrary. He wants as much money as possible to get to boss the rest of the world around.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio. 
