(Photo: DonkeyHotey / Flickr)
Donald Trump’s first proper State of the Union ran an astonishing hour and 20 minutes.
If you tuned out after the first hour, you would have missed his dangerous and deranged vision for our national security. It’s a vision that’s familiar from his tweets, but was just as chilling when read from the teleprompter.
The president began with one of the biggest whoppers in national security: that our military is deprived of funds.
The thing is, Pentagon funding is already at historically high levels, and rising.
Congress awarded the Pentagon with $626 billion in funding in fiscal year 2017. Not only was this higher than the previous year – it was also higher than the peak military spending under Ronald Reagan, who famously ramped up military spending during the final years of the Cold War.
There’s no end in sight. The president has just announced his request for military spending in 2019: at $716 billion, it represents an 18 percent increase over the last budget passed under President Obama for 2016. There’s no reason to believe that the president or congressional hawks would stop there.