Trump slams 'stupid' war spending right after giving the Pentagon a bunch more money

(Image credit: Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)

last updated 12 February 2018

The White House will release the Trump administration's infrastructure proposal Monday, so naturally President Trump spent his morning "executive time" promoting the plan on Twitter. His chosen strategy: to highlight the merits of this spending in contrast with the trillions spent on the United States' 17 years of war in the Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere in the greater Mideast.

The president's point would have had greater persuasive heft had it not been made shortly after he insisted the Pentagon's budget must be increased to $700 billion for this year. That 15.5 percent budget increase is the Defense Department's "biggest year-over-year windfall since the budget soared by 26.6 percent" in 2002, the Chicago Tribune reports, a year in which spending rose to accommodate the very wars Trump's tweet decries. In 2018, Trump intends to spend at least $45 billion on the war in Afghanistan alone.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.