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During his commencement speech at West Point on Saturday, May 24, Donald Trump stated that he rebuilt the military. He told the graduating cadets:
"I rebuilt that army, and I rebuilt the military. And we rebuilt it like nobody has ever rebuilt it before in my first term".
His speech also touched on military strength, national security, and his administration’s policies regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion in the armed forces.
Has the Trump Administration rebuilt the military as he claimed at West Point or just shifted priorities?
Trump claimed he rebuilt the military, but his administration's actions suggest more of a shift in priorities rather than a complete overhaul. His policies focused on streamlining defense spending and procurement, modernizing equipment, and prioritizing speed and flexibility in military operations. Additionally, he has emphasized reversing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the armed forces.
Specifically, his administration cut certain Army programs while prioritizing long-range missiles and uncrewed aerial systems. Vice President JD Vance also outlined a strategic pivot toward avoiding prolonged conflicts and maintaining technological superiority rather than expanding military size.
Trump's military rebuild has led to a shift in U.S. defense strategies, focusing on restraint in the use of force and avoiding prolonged conflicts.
Trump also reversed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the military, arguing that they were distractions from core defense missions. His administration fired senior military officers who supported DEI efforts and banned transgender individuals from serving. These changes have sparked debate over their long-term effects on military readiness and recruitment.
How have Trump's military priorities differed from previous presidents?
- Budget and Spending: Trump has emphasized increased military spending, with his administration proposing the first Pentagon budget exceeding $1 trillion. However, some critics argue that this budget does not add significant new funding but rather reallocates resources.
- Recruitment and Retention: Trump has touted record-breaking military recruitment, though data suggests enlistments were already rising before his reelection. His administration has focused on reviving military morale and recruitment reforms.
- Modernization and Equipment: His administration has prioritized long-range missiles and uncrewed aerial systems while cutting certain Army programs, such as the Improved Turbine Engine Program for Black Hawk helicopters.
- Social Policies: Trump has reversed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, reinstated the transgender military ban, and replaced senior officers who supported DEI efforts. These changes contrast with previous administrations that expanded inclusion policies.
- Military Strategy: Unlike previous presidents who focused on global military presence, Trump has emphasized avoiding prolonged conflicts and reducing overseas deployments. His administration has also pushed for NATO allies to take more responsibility for their own defense.
Since President Trump specifically referred to his first administration, what are the increases in the military budget over Obama?
President Trump increased the military budget compared to the later years of President Obama's administration. The total defense budgets under Trump from 2017 to 2020 amounted to $2.9 trillion (adjusted for inflation), which was higher than the $2.7 trillion spent in Obama's last four years. However, in Obama's first four years, the defense budget was nearly $3.3 trillion.
The increase under Trump was often highlighted in his speeches, where he claimed to have invested $2.5 trillion in military equipment. However, only 20% of that budget was actually spent on purchasing new equipment.
Are there any areas where the Trump administration has reduced military effectiveness or readiness?
There are some concerns that certain policies under President Trump may have impacted military effectiveness or readiness:
- Leadership Changes: Trump has removed several top military officials, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. CQ Brown Jr., and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti. Some experts argue that these firings could disrupt continuity and strategic planning within the military.
- Budget Adjustments: While Trump initially proposed increasing military spending, reports indicate that he briefly considered cutting Pentagon funding by up to 8% before walking back the proposal. Some analysts worry that shifting funds away from traditional defense programs toward missile defense and border security could impact overall readiness.
- Cultural & Policy Shifts: Trump has prioritized removing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives from the military, arguing that they detract from combat effectiveness. Critics argue that reducing DEI programs could limit recruitment and retention, particularly among underrepresented groups.
What overall conclusion one should draw from the President's statement on May 24 that he rebuilt that army, and rebuilt the military, and "we rebuilt it like nobody has ever rebuilt it before in my first term"?
While Trump’s administration undeniably increased military funding and introduced new initiatives, critics argue that the military was already strong before his presidency. Some analysts suggest that his policy changes—such as removing DEI programs and shifting focus away from certain diplomatic efforts— could have mixed effects on overall military effectiveness.
David Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.