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.

Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth later chimed in on social media, voicing enthusiastic support for a $1 trillion military budget and vowing to spend those dollars "on lethality and readiness."

Watch Trump's comments:

William Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, warned in a statement Tuesday that "spending $1 trillion on the Pentagon while hollowing out resources for diplomacy and launching a global trade war is a recipe for international conflict and American decline."

"The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should have taught us that a military-first approach to foreign policy is both ineffective and immensely costly in blood and treasure," said Hartung. "As for dealing with the challenge posed by China, we need a more balanced approach that mixes diplomacy with deterrence and keeps open the option for dialogue and cooperation on urgent issues like climate change, pandemics, and the perilous state of the global economy."

"Pursuing a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget at the expense of other priorities," he added, "would be a trillion-dollar blunder."

Trump and Hegseth's remarks indicate that the Pentagon—long a hotbed of waste and egregious abuse of taxpayer money, largely for the benefit of private contractors—will likely remain insulated from the Elon Musk-led effort to dismantle federal agencies under the guise of boosting government efficiency.

In February, Hegseth authored a memo instructing Pentagon leaders to draw up plans to reduce the military budget in each of the next five years. But it soon became clear that the Pentagon leadership is pushing to divert funds to Trump priorities—including his proposed Iron Dome for America boondoggle—rather than reduce overall spending.

Under Democratic and Republican presidents, and with overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress, the U.S. military budget has been steadily racing toward the $1 trillion mark year after year, despite the Pentagon's inability to pass an audit and mounting evidence of large-scale fraud and misuse of taxpayer money.

Trump's budget proposal would have to be approved by the Republican-controlled Congress, which is currently working—with the president's support—to further slash taxes for the rich and large corporations and cut Medicare, food aid, and other federal assistance programs.

"Trump plans on liquidating Medicaid and SNAP benefits while giving the Pentagon a trillion dollars," wrote Stephen Semler, co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute. "If the Democrats can't make a coherent political message out of these basic facts, they're not an opposition party, or even a party."

This story has been updated to include a statement from William Hartung of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.