re: The Anti Populist Crowd

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They are far to into constant war. They are blind to the influence of the military industrial complex.

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Since becoming president, Donald Trump has overseen historic increases in defense budgets, fawned over military equipment, installed a number of defense industry insiders in top Pentagon positions and made a major push to sell weapons overseas.

But on Monday, Trump said leaders at the Pentagon “want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”

Trump’s backers compared his comments to those made by former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who closed out his time in office by warning of a permanent national security apparatus that guaranteed money would keep flowing toward arms manufacturers.

Yet Trump’s record tells a different story. All three of his hand-picked defense secretaries had ties to the defense industry: Jim Mattis was a member of the General Dynamics board of directors, Pat Shanahan was an executive with Boeing, and Mark Esper was Raytheon’s top lobbyist. Mattis also returned to his board position shortly after leaving the Pentagon, showing the revolving door between industry and the Defense Department.

Nearly half of senior Defense Department officials are connected to military contractors, according to an analysis by the Project on Government Oversight.

But beyond personnel choices, Trump has made the purchase, public display and foreign sales of military hardware a major priority of his administration.

He has championed two defense budgets that blew past $700 billion, and is preparing to sign a third. The bill that Trump signed in 2018 locked in the largest budget the Pentagon had ever seen, only to top it the following year.

He also approved more than $55.6 billion in foreign weapons sales in fiscal 2018, his first complete fiscal year in office, compared to $33.6 billion in foreign military sales in fiscal 2016, the last year of the Obama administration.

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