position on the armed services positions on both. we did a significant plus-up of the military to deal with new threats in china and deal with threats in russia and cyber, the motion of all of a sudden we ll take that money and spend it, the president s own team says a wall isn t the right answer. investments in border security, fencing, drones, more border agents, underground sensors to detect motion. there are things you should do but the wall is not the right answer. let s just spend i think the dollar amount is going to be we can get to a dollar amount but the you got to spend it the right way. you ve got republicans saying, look, the democrats clearly you ve got leverage now in the house side but that the democrats just want to punish the president and win political points. who whoa, who is punishing who? it s this president that is punishing the federal workers in virginia who write to me, they re worried about their mortgage, they re worried about health bills.
border security, not for the wall. that s what we re willing to do. and that s a logical compromise, to say we ll do some plus-up for some fencing, for? additional border security, but we re not going to pay for this wall. and i think people know the democrats don t control the entire government. what they can do is say we have a different agenda. we have an agenda to rebuild our infrastructure. we have an agenda to secure voting rights for the american people. we have an agenda that can put people to work and donald trump is focused on a wall. and that s a very comfortable fight for democrats to have. to say, look, we were willing to compromise on border security but we re not going to pay for some wall that we don t need and people don t want. it needs to be stressed, $5 billion doesn t buy a wall. $5 billion is a fig leaf. and the question it s a way for donald trump to cover a retreat. the question, and it s going to be an interesting question what democrats decide. do they wan
record $700 billion in defense spending for the pentagon. the reality is that the president wanted to defend the nation, the president s first priority, he said this during the campaign and he said this since he was elected. he said it the other night was to defend the nation. jillian: so what does this mean for our military, retired u.s. navy commander is here to weigh in. thank you for joining us this morning, i guess i will tart is 700 billion enough in. good morning, thanks for having me on and quite frankly it s not. when you look at that number while large in and of itself, the reality is it is not nearly enough for what the military needs after almost a decade of declining funds. they started out as percentage of grows domestic product in 2010 it was 4.5%, today it s down to just 3.1% with this plus-up, so quite frankly it s just a start and while the number may seem big in actuality it s not and we need a lot more to do what s necessary.
to speculate. some people are recklessly saying rinsz preebs ma reince pe out. is the president in the white house talking about some changes? absolutely. did he then say hey, you guys, work this out because it s getting too nasty? i m sure did he that as well. abby: media describes it as total and complete chaos. that s the problem. abby: normal for the first days of a presidency to shake things up. pete: that could be huge. could be. we don t know. there is no hard reporting yet on exactly which names may be in or out. the way i heard it a few days ago was that it may just be more about a plus-up, adding more people. they are still short some bodies inside the white house. they have taken a little too much time in sort of getting the running room ready and getting the full team in place it does seem like jared kushner has been taking on a