In the lead up to the US 2024 election, I made it a sort of policy not to take anyone claiming Donald Trump was "anti-war" seriously; after all, I was conscious during his first presidency and I have a very clear memory of him engaging in nuclear brinksmanship with North Korea via social media, dropping the largest conventional bomb in Afghanistan just to prove he could, and actively *trying* to start a war with Iran - in addition to his material support for the KSA's war in Yemen, scaling up airstrikes and drone attacks in our ongoing wars, as well as a significant increase in American covert military operations which often had disastrous consequences. Perhaps most tellingly, Trump increased US military spending each and every single year during his first four years in office.
As such I found it pretty laughable when motivated observers, including a few in "independent" media claiming to be progressives, defended the rise of Elon Musk's DOGE initiative by suggesting the Trump regime would find and end "fraud, waste, and abuse" in the Pentagon budget. In so much as I bothered to engage with these arguments, I predicted that neither Trump nor Musk would touch the military budget, or any other part of the US government that's about committing violence against their perceived enemies, including domestically; with the possible exception of an FBI Trump still hates because they investigated him for crimes he absolutely committed. As such, I can't say I was surprised to learn that during a sit-down meeting with noted genocidal fascist warmonger and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump bragged about his intentions to *increase* U.S. military spending to literally a trillion dollars.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-trillion-military-budget
Trump Pledges $1 Trillion for US Military While Hitting Working Class With Huge Tax Hike
"President Donald Trump on Monday publicly backed an annual budget of roughly $1 trillion for the U.S. military as his administration rushed ahead with a destructive tariff scheme that amounts to a major tax increase on American households, with working-class families set to bear much of the pain.
Speaking to reporters at the White House during a sit-down with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump said his administration has signed off on an upcoming military budget in the vicinity of $1 trillion, which would be a record sum. The military budget for the current fiscal year is $892 billion, more than half of the federal government's discretionary budget.
"Nobody's seen anything like it," Trump said Monday of his $1 trillion budget proposal."
Given that I see no reason to engage with the absurd and typically disingenuous idea that Trump is somehow not a bog standard American imperialist, I'd like to focus in on the budgetary arguments about fraud and waste that are obfuscating and propping up what is clearly a billionaire nazi bust-out operation being conducted on the US government. If you take a step back and simply look at the argument people defending DOGE are presenting here, the whole game falls apart:
- Health inspectors, disease specialists, labor board adjudicators, consumer protection departments, food and drug inspectors, IRS officials working to get the super rich to pay the taxes they owe, feeding starving children in conflict zones, Inspector Generals that oversee government officials, Medicaid and SNAP benefits, the social security check that means your grandma isn't living on cat food? Waste, fraud, and abuse.
- A bloated Pentagon wholly captured by the military industrial complex, that literally cannot pass an audit, is already a source of large-scale fraud and waste, and currently spends more money on "defense" than any other country on earth by a degree that's objectively mind blowing; particularly when you factor in that we're not *officially* involved in a major war at the moment? Vitally important spending and in fact a reason to celebrate!
Look folks, I'm creeping closer and closer to my fiftieth year on this Earth, so you don't need to tell me that imperialism and obscene military spending is a bipartisan objective in American politics. The critique I'm articulating about Trump's spending on the murder machine could just as easily have been written about every Democrat President in the post-war era. But that's also the point; Downmarket Mussolini, a man who just committed a war crime in Yemen, wholly supports Israel's genocide in Gaza, is openly talking about trying to annex Canada, and whose regime is building support to potentially bomb Mexico, is just another fucking imperialist and none of these nazis give a fuck about fraud and waste - they just want to starve your grandparents and poison your children to pay for tax cuts for the uber rich.
