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Will Trump decide to start a war to 'make America great again'?

Trump tried out a new tone in his 1st address to Congress, but his harshness toward Muslims and immigrants and his focus on militarism still shone through. With $54 billion in new Pentagon spending, will Trump need a war to "make America great again."

When the doors to the House chamber sprung open at 9 p.m. Tuesday, President Trump walked through with a new look – blue striped tie, fitted suit – that held out the promise that his first address to Congress would also bring a fresh start to a presidency that's already underwater after just 40 days and 40 nights.

He never quite breached the surface. To be sure, Trump's 70-minute address offered a few of the best moments of his brief and chaos-filled presidency – a very belated but still necessary condemnation of anti-Semitism and the shocking hate crime against Indian Americans in Kansas, some nods to centrist programs like family leave, and unusual attempts at uplifting rhetoric, like a plea for Americans to have "the courage to share the dreams that fill our hearts."

But Trump seems still most animated uttering words that are harsh and divisive – lighting up and savoring every syllable as he condemned "radical…Islamic…terrorism" even after his new national security advisor had warned him the phrase would hurt America's interests overseas.

His off-the-record promise to TV news anchors for a kinder, gentler immigration policy offered nothing for refugees or the undocumented; instead, he worked to instill his branding of undocumented immigrants as criminals "that threaten our communities and prey on our citizens" and punctuated his words by inviting three relatives of people murdered by immigrants to sit with his wife. When Trump called for the creation of a special Homeland Security office for victims of immigrant crime, some Democrats booed.

You can change the tie but you can't change the man.

With Trump's pleas to repeal Obamacare and spend $1 trillion on infrastructure facing an uncertain fate in Congress, Trump's tough words on immigration, his plan for a massive and expensive border wall with Mexico and his new scheme to dramatically increase Pentagon spending may be what remains now that the Republican applause has died down. A president who got elected promising us jobs is instead giving us a walled "security state."

On Wednesday morning, Trump will get to put his money where his mouth was, with a new budget, and arguably the biggest winner will be a Defense Department slated to get $54 billion in new spending that America doesn't exactly have. In his speech, Trump said "we must provide the men and women of the United States military with the tools they need to prevent war and –- if they must –- to fight and to win."

The multi-billion-dollar spending spree goes well beyond the president's vague promises from the campaign trail about strengthening the military. Nobody has a clear idea of what throwing so much additional money at the Pentagon will actually do, and why it's needed for a nation that already spends more on its military than the next eight nations combined, and that has doubled its defense spending since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

"What exactly is the problem that a huge increase in military spending is expected to solve?" Andrew Bacevich, the Boston University historian who fought in Vietnam, lost a son in Iraq and is a leading critic of U.S. military policy, asked rhetorically when I contacted him by email today. "Our military budget is already easily the biggest in the world.  Why more? When it comes to national security, the truly pertinent question is this one:  Why despite vast exertions over many years has the US military been unable to bring our wars to a favorable conclusion?  The answer to that question is not that we've spent too little money."

Indeed. Meanwhile, since Trump is determined to follow the Ronald Reagan playbook and cut rich people's taxes at the same time that he's levitating the Pentagon from your weekly paycheck deduction, he's also planning to slash and maybe eliminate funding for programs like the arts, public TV and radio, legal aid for the poor, etc., etc., etc. You know, the things that helped make America a nation worth fighting for and possibly dying.

He'd also sharply reduce spending at the State Department, the folks who try to stop wars by talking to the leaders of other nations. A few years ago, a general named James Mattis told a congressional hearing: "If you don't fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately." Today, Mattis is Trump's Secretary of Defense.

They should talk!

Here's what I'm really worried that this is all about, at the end of the day. Trump made a promise to the people who voted for him, that he would – and I think I saw this on a hat the other day – "Make America Great Again." But I believe Trump thinks America can't be truly great until it gets into a war. And wins. Country and alleged reason to be determined.

On Monday, Trump told the nation's governors who were meeting in Washington that he was determined "to start winning wars again…When I was young, in high school and in college, everybody used to say we never lost a war. America never lost. Now, we never win a war." Actually Trump was in college here in Philly in  1968 when the Tet Offensive was a pivot point in the Vietnam War that America lost. Of course, Trump kinda missed that one. Bone spurs. In his left foot. Or the right. Neither Trump nor anyone else remembers.

Maybe Trump also doesn't remember how unchecked militarism and complaints that "we don't win wars anymore," generally followed by an unprovoked invasion of some nearby country, has been the refuge of tinpot dictators ever since Mussolini's Long March. I'm not holding my breath, but Trump and his team should re-learn that history and then read what a past U.S. president once said about cutting social programs to buy tanks.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

The president who uttered those words in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower, knew more about wars – and why not to fight them – than any other commander-in-chief in American history. Ike's wisdom was sorely missed tonight.