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Joshua Scheer
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ignited a firestorm of ridicule Thursday after releasing a video praising President Donald Trump’s proposed $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget as a fiscally responsible plan that “puts the American taxpayer first.” Critics across the political spectrum called the claim mathematically impossible, strategically incoherent, and politically insulting at a moment when millions of Americans are struggling with rising costs of living.
Thanks to President Trump’s $1.5 trillion defense budget, this War Department has moved from bureaucracy to business.
This is a FISCALLY RESPONSIBLE INVESTMENT in our Arsenal of Freedom—ensuring our military remains the most lethal fighting force in the world. pic.twitter.com/ykIfMw3kuU
— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) May 7, 2026
The video opens with Hegseth accusing defense contractors of gouging the Pentagon — a problem watchdogs have documented for decades — before pivoting to the assertion that Trump’s budget, the largest in U.S. history, represents a crackdown on waste. Hegseth touts a hand‑picked group of private‑sector negotiators dubbed “Deal Team Six,” who he claims will rein in contractor excess.
What Hegseth never explains is how a budget that is over 50% larger than 2025 defense spending — and more than four times China’s military budget — could possibly be described as fiscally responsible.
“Spread this lame‑ass video everywhere,” wrote former Obama NSC staffer Tommy Vietor, noting that the administration is demanding unprecedented military spending while ignoring soaring healthcare, housing, and food costs. “Shut up if you want better healthcare or for Social Security to remain solvent. All you get is more bombs to drop on Iranian schools.”
Reporters and analysts echoed the disbelief. Indigo Olivier of The New Republic argued that Democrats are missing a political opportunity by failing to highlight Pentagon price‑gouging with the same intensity they devote to culture‑war distractions. Former Rep. Justin Amash called the budget “hundreds of billions more in waste and fraud — at taxpayer expense.”
But the most blistering critique came from former GOP strategist Jeff Timmer, who described Hegseth’s performance as “performative dipshittery, wrapped in fictional jingoism, delivered by an incompetent drunk wearing the clothes of an adolescent boy.”
Even defense‑budget experts were stunned. Steven Kosiak of the Quincy Institute wrote last month that the proposal is “difficult to overstate” in its scale and “unhinged from reality and sober policymaking.”
The contradiction at the heart of Hegseth’s message — that the administration is simultaneously slashing waste and demanding the largest military budget in world history — has become a defining feature of the Trump II era. The administration has repeatedly framed its Iran war spending as a patriotic necessity while dismissing concerns about domestic underinvestment as unpatriotic or unserious.
Here’s congressman Jason Crow on reasons on the chocie between healthcare and war
Hegseth, who has previously compared Trump to Jesus and cast journalists as modern Pharisees, appears to be positioning himself as the administration’s chief salesman for the war budget. But Thursday’s backlash suggests the public may not be buying it.
As one critic put it: “This is going to go down in history as one of the biggest own‑goals yet — and one of the worst pieces of war propaganda we’ve ever seen.”
Never forget: this comes from an administration that, just last month, openly declared it could not afford childcare or healthcare because, in Trump’s words, the federal government has only one real priority: war and “military protection.”
“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,” Trump said. “They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”
He continued: “We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care. You got to let a state take care of day care, and they should pay for it too.”
The message could not be clearer: there is always money for bombs, borders, and war—but never enough for children, healthcare, or basic human dignity.
In the end, Hegseth’s sales pitch only exposes the truth this administration keeps trying to bury: a government that can always find trillions for war but never pennies for its own people is not “putting taxpayers first”—it’s putting them last. And no amount of flag‑draped propaganda can hide the simple, brutal math of an empire that starves its citizens while feeding its war machine.
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