Donald Trump loves bragging about how much he has done for the military, but the truth is that he is actually doing things that would harm and reduce resources for it.
The president has been pouting and throwing a temper tantrum that his pathetic, unwanted and racist border wall has yet to happen, and he’s just been caught actively plotting to steal funds from the military to make it happen. Recently, the Pentagon flagged a whopping $1 billion that Trump was going to take from military pay and pensions and allocate to his border wall!
According to the Associated Press, the Pentagon flagged the funds to limit how much money Trump could take from military construction projects. Jon Soltz, who is the chair of the veterans political organization VoteVets, spoke out against the president’s efforts and stated that it was “absolutely disgusting” that Trump would take money that was supposed to be for military salaries and use it for his “racist, vanity wall” instead.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) explained that the money had been available because the Army was short a few thousand recruits. He said:
This is pay that would have gone to Army recruits that we can’t recruit. So there’s a ‘savings’ because we can’t recruit. The other part was they offered a voluntary change in military pensions, and they overestimated how many people would sign up for it.”
Interestingly enough, Trump is one of the main reasons that the Army didn’t recruit enough service members – thanks to the Trump administration’s immigration policies, the Pentagon can’t recruit immigrants without green cards who want to serve.
Soltz explained that if Trump uses the military pay to fund his wall, the military will have even more trouble reaching their recruiting targets:
When we’re not meeting our recruiting goals, the one thing that is not going to help attract new recruits is to say, ‘We might come after your pay, or not fund your other needs, to build the wall.’ If the question is whether or not Donald Trump would put his wall ahead of our troops and their families, we have our answer: Yes.”
It’s disgusting that Trump continues to keep trying for his border wall even though Congress has rejected him multiple times. It is even more repulsive that he’s willing to rob the military to do so.
Featured image via screen capture
