Trump’s False Military Equipment Claim

President Donald Trump has falsely claimed his administration invested “$2.5 trillion in all of the greatest equipment in the world” for the military. That’s approximately the total for defense budgets from 2017 to 2020, but the cost of purchasing new military equipment was 20% of that.

It’s true the Defense Department budgets passed under Trump — which total $2.9 trillion, in inflation-adjusted dollars, actually — have been larger than they were in the latter years of his predecessor. In the last four years under then-President Barack Obama, the defense budgets,...