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Trump Just Kicked Transgender Troops out of the Military. This One Ugly Quote Says It All.

By Greg Sargent, The Washington Post

26 July 17

resident Trump announced this morning that he will be banning transgender troops from serving in the military, and all indications are that this may also end up kicking out thousands of them who are already serving. The Post reports:

President Trump said he will ban transgender people from serving in the military in any capacity, a reversal of the Obama administration decision that would have allowed transgender recruits to serve, he announced on social media on Wednesday.

Citing the need to focus on victory, Trump said that the military cannot accept the burden of higher medical costs and “disruption” that transgender troops would require.

“After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.”

According to a recent RAND Corp. study, around 4,000 transgender people currently serve in the U.S. military. They would presumably be expelled. Gay rights advocates are already threatening legal action against the move. As The Post notes, a bipartisan majority in the House (24 Republicans and 190 Democrats) recently rejected a measure that would have “blocked the Pentagon from offering gender transition therapies to active duty service members,” but this has remained a “pet cause” for conservatives.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis was supposed to be examining whether to continue former president Barack Obama’s policy of allowing transgender service, and Mattis’s review was due in December. It’s unclear whether Trump simply steamrolled this process to rush forth his ban.

There will be plenty of time to debate the legal and substantive merits of the policy. But for now, I wanted to focus on the politics of it. Here is how one administration official justified the move in a quote given to Axios’s Jonathan Swan:

This forces Democrats in Rust Belt states like Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin to take complete ownership of this issue. How will blue collar voters in these states respond when senators up for reelection in 2018 like Debbie Stabenow are forced to make their opposition to this a key plank of their campaigns?

In emails to me this morning, top Democrats flatly rejected the notion that they need to fear the politics of this debate. Guy Cecil, the head of Priorities USA, the Super PAC that is staking out a central role in opposing Trump for Democrats, told me:

The comments only serve to reveal how morally repugnant this administration really is by playing politics with our country’s defenses and attacking fellow Americans who honorably serve to protect our freedom. It also reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how Senate campaigns work. If this is their approach, than 2018 will definitely be a banner year for Democrats.

Meredith Kelly, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, emailed me:

President Trump’s attack on Americans who want to step up and make incredible sacrifice to serve our country is disgusting, and it’s made worse by the political calculation behind it. Every Republican should speak out against it. President Trump is a draft dodger and if he wants to talk about 2018, we’ve got dozens of veteran candidates who have already shown what it looks like to step up and serve our country to keep us safe, and are ready to do it again in Congress.

Swan, the reporter who floated that administration official’s quote, subsequently tweeted that it did not represent the full range of views in the White House. If so, that’s good to hear, and let’s hope that administration officials clarify this. But in a certain sense, the quote does neatly capture a larger, important truth about how Trump and his administration have sought to appeal to his voters: There is much more of a culture-war dimension to their communications and political strategy than is commonly acknowledged.

The culture war is back

It is often claimed that Trump won his voters — particularly in the Rust Belt — with a “populist economic nationalism” that appealed to their economic anxieties and their dissatisfaction with elites who have shafted them on issues such as trade and immigration. But on multiple issues — from health care to taxes — Trump has governed like much more of an orthodox, plutocrat-friendly Republican — a Paul Ryanesque limited-government conservative — than he signaled he would, supporting fiscal policies that would dramatically roll back the safety net and Wall Street regulations while massively cutting taxes for the rich and corporations. Pretty much all that remains of Trump’s populist economic nationalism is the mass deportations, the travel ban, and the vow to defend coal and manufacturing jobs from pointy-headed elitist regulators both domestic and international.

Trump has promised to renegotiate our trade deals, but there’s no telling whether he will do so in a way that benefits workers. Meanwhile, another key element of his populist nationalism — the vow of massive infrastructure spending — is stalled, and may end up amounting to nothing. In a sense, the infrastructure issue also confirms the point: Recall that when top Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon vowed huge infrastructure spending, he promised to get “shipyards” and “ironworks” all “jacked up.” As Jonathan Chait put it, there was no economic rationale for this; it reflected little more than “nostalgia for the manly work of an older generation.” The same goes for Trump’s vow to restore the glory of an old economic order based on coal and manufacturing, which is also suffused with far more cultural nostalgia than policy reality.

And now we’re told that Trump’s latest move on transgender troops is all about a culture-war-laden appeal to Rust Belt voters in advance of 2018.