Trump's Military Dictatorship Budget

Historian Timothy Snyder: 

(Regarding) Trump’s proposal to increase the military budget by nearly 50%: it’s a bribe to officers and soldiers so that they will side with him when he tries to overthrow the Constitution and stay in power indefinitely. This is where all the evidence points. 

If there is any consensus about Trump, it is that he is “transactional.” There is zero evidence that he has a notion of US interests. 

There is abundant evidence that he understands politics as a matter of people being paid off. And that is the framework in which to understand his proposed military budget. He is paying people off. 

No other explanation fits the data. Increasing the military budget from about a trillion dollars to about 1.5 trillion dollars makes no fiscal sense. We can’t pay for it without destroying basic government functions and soaking the American taxpayer. 

It makes no military sense. It is based upon no doctrinal innovation or review of technology. The “Trump-class” battleships it proposes are archaic, nonsensical, and more than a little embarrassing. The budget proposal makes no managerial sense. The Pentagon has never passed an audit, and Pete Hegseth has proven himself spectacularly unable to manage organizations of any kind. 

Putting an additional half a trillion dollars under his authority annually is superpower suicide. 

The military budget proposal only makes political sense. But it does not make democratic political sense. It is not designed to be popular among the population at large. It makes authoritarian political sense. It is designed to popular among the people with guns who Trump imagines will help him control the population at large (and they should realize this, and they should be offended.) 

It shifts taxpayer money to soldiers and officers in exchange for their personal loyalty to an aspiring dictator. It is a bribe to stay in power as part of an attempt to change the regime of the United States. It is not a military budget but a military dictatorship budget. 

Very often, when people say that Trump is “transactional,” they mean something like “just transactional”; he only cares about money, so in the end he cannot be that bad. But that is not where transactionalism leads: it leads to the basic reality that Trump has no notion of interests beyond his own, and will find it natural to take your money and spend it for his power. 

Transactionalism, the conventional wisdom about Trump, leads to the conclusion that the military budget is a bribe for power. But if we need more evidence of the intention, it is all around us. Hegseth is purging the upper ranks of the armed services on the basis of politics. 

Both Hegseth and Trump speak about a future mission of the military against the “enemy within” in the “homeland.” It’s a military dictatorship budget.