You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

President Trump Tours Aircraft Carrier, Vowing Huge Military Increase

HeadlineMar 03, 2017

President Donald Trump toured a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in Virginia Thursday, using the massive warship as a backdrop to push his plan to increase the Pentagon’s budget by $54 billion.

President Donald Trump: “Our military requires sustained, stable funding to meet the growing needs placed in our defense. Right now, our aging front-line strike and strike fighters, a whole aircraft, many, many aircraft, are often more likely to be down for maintenance than they are to be up in the sky. Our Navy is now the smallest it’s been since, believe it or not, World War I. Don’t worry. Gonna soon be the largest it’s been.”

On Monday, Trump proposed increasing the military budget to just over $600 billion—a nearly 10 percent increase—while deeply slashing the budgets of other agencies, including the EPA and the State Department.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top