July 27, 2017

Bill Kristol, founder of The Weekly Standard told MSNBC that Trump thinks he's running a dictatorship after irresponsibly dismissing every transgender soldier in the military.

This morning, with no advance notice, Trump tweeted these out.

MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace opined that Trump seems more "off the rails" than normal after saying he'll be more presidential than Abraham Lincoln.

At first Kristol discussed the hiring of the new Communications directer and said he's not a fan of Anthony Scaramucci because he's so similar to Trump and would ultimately be worse for the administration than Sean Spicer.

Kristol said, "I come back to the transgender thing. I'm so infuriated by it because there are complicated issues about women in combat, whether you should pay for certain operations."

He commented that he thought these issues, including integrating genders have been debated remarkably well overall.

Kristol continued, "And then he just gets up and tweets this totally irresponsible crazy thing, which shows deeply though, he thinks it's a dictatorship, "he said.

"He thinks, he wakes up - decides that we should expel 2,400 people from the military and that that going to happened as if there's no uniform code of military justice, there aren't ways that you have to discharge people, that people don't have the rights, that the military doesn't have all kinds of concerns about those who signed up under some expectations --- but it's deeply revealing about Trump I think."

Kristol's dictatorship remarks ring true especially after Politico reported that Trump unceremoniously fired all transgenders from the military over a budget dispute in the House so he could get funds for his wall.

I kid you not. Trump never consulted with his generals about medical costs at all.

Numerous House conservatives and defense hawks this week had threatened to derail their own legislation if it did not include a prohibition on Pentagon funding for gender reassignment surgeries, which they deem a waste of taxpayer money. But GOP leaders were caught in a pinch between those demands and those of moderate Republicans who considered the proposal blatantly discriminatory.

“This isn’t about the transgender issue; it’s about the taxpayer dollars going to pay for the surgery out of the defense budget.”

The president’s directive, of course, took the House issue a step beyond paying for gender reassignment surgery and other medical treatment. House Republicans were never debating expelling all transgender troops from the military.

“This is like someone told the White House to light a candle on the table and the WH set the whole table on fire,” a senior House Republican aide said in an email. The source said that although GOP leaders asked the White House for help on the taxpayer matter specifically, they weren’t expecting — and got no heads up on — Trump’s far-reaching directive.

Discussion

We welcome relevant, respectful comments. Any comments that are sexist or in any other way deemed hateful by our staff will be deleted and constitute grounds for a ban from posting on the site. Please refer to our Terms of Service for information on our posting policy.
Mastodon