Donald Trump has been repeatedly fact checked, abandoned, and embarrassed by his own team, and his increased unhinged behavior has just caused it to happen again.
Thanks to the president doubling down on his racism lately when it comes to a caravan of Central American immigrants heading toward the border, the Pentagon has had to step in and do damage control. Trump has made some outrageous claims about how he’s sending 15,000 troops to the border to stop this caravan, and the Pentagon just made him look like a complete idiot. Earlier this week, Trump said in an interview:
As far as the caravan is concerned, our military is out. We have about 5,800. We’ll go up to anywhere between 10,000 and 15,000 military personnel on top of border patrol, ICE, and everybody else at the border. We have to have a wall of people.”
Currently, there are 5,200 military personnel deployed at the border, and no one knows where Trump is pulling this 15,000 number from. The Pentagon has responded after Trump’s irresponsible comment, as the Associated Press reported:
The Pentagon says ‘more than 7,000’ troops were being sent to the southwest border to support the customs and border protection agents. Officials said that number could reach a maximum of about 8,000 under present plans.”
I think we can all agree that 8,000 is nowhere near 15,000 — so this was just another one of Trump’s lies, which was shut down by his own military commanders. This has got to be embarrassing enough for Trump, but there’s more. The Pentagon has debunked previous reports that 14,000 military personnel could be sent to the border:
On Monday, officials announced that about 5,200 were being deployed. The next day, the air force general running the operation said more than the initially announced total were going, and he pointedly rejected a news report that it could reach 14,000, saying that was ‘not consistent with what’s actually being planned.’”
Trump is obviously lying left and right now that he only has a few days to scare voters into voting GOP in the midterm election. Fortunately, everyone — even his own people — keeps proving just how untrustworthy he is.
Featured image via screen capture
