With the midterm elections in the rearview mirror, the daily warnings from President Trump about the imminent danger posed by the heavily hyped “caravan” of Central American refugees creeping towards the U.S. border have mysteriously ceased, proving that the manufactured crisis was simply a naked political ploy to monger sufficient fear to turn out Trump’s immigrant-addled base.
Yet the financial and logistical repercussions of Trump’s cynically manipulative actions persist despite the evaporation of their immediate political utility. The most notable residual effect of the president’s self-serving attempt to violate his oath of office by using his powers to benefit his own political party is the deployment of thousands of active duty troops to the border with Mexico to help defend America from the imaginarily dangerous hoards of refugees.
Now, one Democratic Senator is calling out Trump for the hardships he’s forced upon the armed forces and their families with this enormous waste of taxpayer dollars and military resources. Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) tweeted out this message addressed to the president today asking him to drop the pretense and the expense and send the troops home where they belong.
Deploying troops to our own border for no national security reason is one of the biggest scandals of this Presidency. These dedicated, skilled, highly trained men and women will likely miss Thanksgiving w family, are near American cities but eating MREs. Let them go home.
— Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) November 11, 2018
Senator Schatz is simply requesting that President respect the troops by leveling with them about the obvious political nature of their mission and abandoning the pretense that their deployment was anything but a huge waste of time and resources now that the carnivals of fear that he calls his political rallies have ended for now.
Any expectations that Trump will do the right thing in this instance should be torpedoed immediately by the knowledge that the president is mentally incapable of ever admitting that anything he ever did was wrong since he regards any recognition of personal error as an unforgivable sign of weakness.
Hopefully, someone in the administration will invent some sort of face-saving excuse that will allow the president to quietly allow the troops to spend the holidays with their families.
If not, it will only confirm what we all already know, that the only value that U.S. military personnel has in the eyes of this transactional president is what they can help Trump gain for his own benefit and that he actually couldn’t care less about them despite his protestations otherwise.
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