Reprinted with permission from Shareblue.
Trump lies about everything so it’s no surprise he’s lying about deploying U.S. troops.
Usually seen as one of the president’s most solemn and serious duties, Trump appears to be treating the task as a game as he makes up numbers about how many U.S. troops are being sent to Mexico border to supposedly protect Americans from refugees who are more than a thousand miles away from the U.S.
The move comes in the same week Trump released perhaps the most openly racist political ad in modern American campaign history.
Trump initially ordered 5,200 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. Then out of the blue on Tuesday he nearly tripled that commitment to 15,000 troops.
But over at the Defense Department, officials have no idea what he’s talking about, raising doubts about whether Trump’s latest claim has any basis in reality.
“Trump’s comments left some in the Pentagon scratching their heads. Officials said they had no plans to deploy as many as 15,000 troops,” the Associated Press reported.
Initially, Pentagon officials said 1,000 troops would be sent. Then it got bumped up to 5,000, and maybe 8,000. Now Trump has suddenly doubled that figure.
Trump has a disturbing history of not coordinating with the Pentagon when it comes to making dramatic military announcements.
In terms of perspective of how ridiculous Trump’s call to arms is to defend the U.S. against these refugees, “a deployment of 15,000 would bring the military commitment on the border to roughly the same level as in war-torn Afghanistan,” according to the AP.
Some veterans are denouncing the whole thing as an obvious political ploy designed to scare up Trump-base votes ahead of next week’s midterms:
Why not 100,000? Why not a bajillion zillion?
What a joke. Now he is pulling numbers out of thin air, trying to make anyone believe that migrants 1000 miles away pose any kind of real threat, just to scare up votes.
Media must report on this as the complete sham that it is. https://t.co/O2zkWjUHFG
— VoteVets (@votevets) October 31, 2018
Trump insists the military overkill is needed because the marching migrants pose a bigger danger than anyone can imagine.
“You have caravans coming up that look a lot larger than it’s reported actually,” he said. “I’m pretty good at estimating crowd size.”
Trump, of course, humiliated himself within hours of being inaugurated in 2017, when he and the White House launched epic lies about how the unimpressive crowd that assembled to watch his swearing in was actually the largest inauguration crowd in American history.
Adding to absurdity of this whole pre-election troop deployment production is that fact that federal law restricts what the military can do on American soil with regards to law enforcement.
So military personnel being sent to the border won’t be able to seize illegal drugs, detain migrants, or an in away directly stop people from crossing into the U.S.
Trump’s using U.S. troops as his political play thing. And the Pentagon doesn’t know what to do.
Published with permission of The American Independent.
